Asian Ethnicity

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Coolies, tea plantations and the limits of physical

violence in colonial Assam: A historiographical
note

Jahnu Bharadwaj

To cite this article: Jahnu Bharadwaj (2021) Coolies, tea plantations and the limits of physical
violence in colonial Assam: A historiographical note, Asian Ethnicity, 22:4, 542-562, DOI:
10.1080/14631369.2019.1696666

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ASIAN ETHNICITY
2021, VOL. 22, NO. 4, 542–562
https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2019.1696666

ARTICLE

Coolies, tea plantations and the limits of physical violence in

colonial Assam: A historiographical note
Jahnu Bharadwaj
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The paper seeks to locate the violence perpetrated on the bodies of Received 17 June 2019
the coolies in colonial Assam. The paper observes that the existing Accepted 2 November 2019
historiography on tea plantations in colonial Assam restricts corporeal KEYWORDS
violence on the coolies within the boundaries of the plantation estates Violence; Coolie; tea
and does not talk about the permeation of such violence to spaces and plantations; colonial Assam;
coolies totally outside of the plantation production process. This paper, historiography
with the evidence from a case from nineteenth-century Assam,
extends the limits of corporeal violence on the coolies beyond the
physical setup of the plantations. The paper proposes that histories of
corporeal violence on labour in the colonial era need to look beyond
the peripheries of the plantations and towards the social regimes of
power under colonialism. The paper demonstrates the complicit char-
acter of the state and newly landed and moneyed native classes in the
colony, which aggravated the magnitudes of violence on labour.

Introduction
Independent investigation regarding bodily oppression of labourers in the tea plantations
in colonial Assam began with Dwarkanath Ganguli’s fiery reports in the pages of certain
Bengali newspapers and journals.1 Ganguli’s reports inspired many contemporary public
intellectuals to look at the oppressive labour conditions in the tea plantations.2 Ramkumar
Vidyaratna’s acclaimed Bengali memoir Coolykahini created a massive uproar in the public
sphere in Bengal, and also within the official circles.3 Members of the British Trades Union
Congress Delegation to India A. A. Purcell and J. Hallsworth, who visited India during the
period 1927–28, submitted a report on labour conditions in the industrial sectors in British
India titled ‘A Report on the Labour Conditions in India’.4 The report had a section which
launched a powerful critique of the labour abuses in the tea plantations, and declared that
‘the tea gardens of Assam are virtually slave plantations, and that in Assam tea the sweat,
hunger and despair of a million Indians enter year by year’.5 These investigative works
generated enough public attention to the labour conditions in the tea plantations. Early
scholarly works like D. Chaman Lall’s Coolie: The Story of Labour and Capital in India too
explored labour conditions in the tea plantations.6 Lall’s work touched upon areas such as
the nexus between European capital and the colonial state, coercive and deceitful labour

CONTACT Jahnu Bharadwaj [email protected] Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar,

Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382355 India
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 543

recruitment, and the penal provisions of employment in the plantations.7 Rajani Kanta
Das’s Plantation Labour in India, contained an exhaustive description of the origin and all
the aspects of the tea plantation industry and the labour question.8 Das depicted the
oppressive methods used in the recruitment of labourers and for enforcing a work regime
as a reflection of an attitude to maximise profit at the expense of the misery of the labourers.
Das emphasised that the instances of violence in the plantations, at least towards the end of
the nineteenth century, were not simple cases of ordinary crimes, and those were, rather,
industrial disputes emerging chiefly out of economic reasons. Das commented, ‘The
fundamental cause of the industrial disputes and unrest, especially in recent years, was
the growing consciousness among the labourers themselves.’9
Many subsequent works carry forward the line of enquiry initiated by these early works.
A plethora of historical enquiries has linked the violence and abuses in the tea plantations in
colonial Assam to the logic of capitalism driving the colonial tea plantation economy. The
horrific episodes of violence, operated mostly on the bodies of the coolies, thus, became signs
of class conflict resulting out of exploitative class relations in the plantation economy. In
Plantation labour in colonial India, historian Ranajit Das Gupta looked at the subtle mechan-
isms through which the capitalist plantations in collaboration with the colonial state, created
a regime of unfree coerced labour, in contrast to the logic of free labour in capitalism.10 Das
Gupta explored the 'legal and extra-legal', and 'market and non-market' ways through which
labour was managed within the colonial tea plantations.11 Scholars like Sharit Bhowmik also
followed a similar line of argument in his work on the tea plantations in Assam. In the
introduction to the joint volume named Tea Plantation Labour in India, Bhowmik looked at
the origin and development of the tea plantations and the plantation labour regime in
colonial Assam.12 He demonstrated the process of procuring a captive labour force at
a lower cost with an actively collaborating political state. For Bhowmik, in the labour-
intensive plantation industry, coercion became an invaluable method to ensure a steady
and bonded labour force.13
These early labour histories read the violence in the plantations as signs of class
conflict and industrial disputes, and the corporeal violence on the bodies of the coolies
did not get precedence in these studies.14 Amalendu Guha stands out as somewhat more
nuanced than the earlier pool of Marxist labour historians. Guha’s Planter Raj to Swaraj
offered a brief yet outrightly hard-hitting analysis of bodily oppressions of the imported
workers. However, his central thesis was that since the early decades of colonial hold over
Assam, the British capital penetrated the economy of Assam and had ‘started building an
infrastructure to sustain the exotic capitalistic set-up’. For Guha, the tea plantations were
the epitomes of the ‘exotic capitalistic set-up’, and he would agree that the violence on the
coolies was a fallout of the making of that set-up.15
Elizabeth Kolsky, hence, accuses that most of the existing scholarship on tea plantations
in colonial Assam have taken the excessive violence on the bodies of the coolies for granted,
as an outcome of a coercive labour regime.16 What Kolsky is suggesting is to delink the
physical violence in the plantations from the clear rationale of an oppressive labour regime,
necessitated by the economic interests of the colonial state. For Kolsky, it is essential to look
at the complex and evolving paradigm of corporeal violence in the tea plantation vis-à-vis
the complex role of the colonial state. Kolsky’s own work is imperative here. Kolsky takes
the analytical categories of body, law, and violence, and reconstructs a history where the
three categories interact with each other in ways more than one. Law, and by extension, the
544 J. BHARADWAJ

colonial state, played a conspicuous role in enabling the violence on the body of the coolies
in the plantations. Kolsky indicates that physical violence, often perpetrated on the bodies
of the destitute coolie in the tea plantations, was racist in nature and an inherent colonial
logic orchestrated its occurrence. The fact that the law of the state played a conspicuous role
in enabling and defining ‘legitimate’ violence in the plantations becomes clear when we
look at how law and the state treated violence perpetrated by the Europeans on the body of
the workers vis-a-vis violence perpetrated by confrontational workers. Kolsky, in a precise
phrase, states that there was ‘one scale of justice for the planter and another for the coolie’.17
Some recent works have given considerable space and importance to talk about
violence in the plantations. These studies have pointed out that violence was perpetrated
on the bodies of the coolies by different agents and actors engaged in the political
economy of plantations, and the colonial state acted as the enabling political regime.
Historian Samita Sen offers a feminist perspective to labour history of the tea plantations.
She looks at the female workers in the tea plantations and their plight both because of
lack of adequate medical facilities and the grueling work regime at the plantations. Sen
explores the abuses that the female workers faced right from the time of recruitment at
coolie depots, during the journey to the plantations and the blatant physical and sexual
harassment from the planters and their conniving agents at the worksites.18 In a recent
article named ‘Gender, Violence, and Justice in Colonial Assam: The Webb Case, c. 1884,ʹ
Ashley Wright traces the trajectory of a rape case of a coolie woman by a European steam
engine driver named C. Webb from nineteenth-century Assam.19 Wright contextualises
the Webb case in the world of indenture recruitment, penal contract of recruitment,
planters’ absolutism, violence, an indifferent judicial machinery and a vocal nationalist
press and public, and argues that a close reading of the case reveals ‘the ways that
hierarchies of race, class, caste, and gender were constructed and were manifest in
daily life’.20 Wright suggests that in the discourse around the Webb case, the rape victim
was central and yet hard to see. Wright argues that the treatments of the Webb case by the
criminal courts, the colonial state, the nationalist press, and the Indian nationalists
exhibit that sexual violence was a critical element in the classic colonial contest between
the colonial rulers and the nationalists in nineteenth-century India.
Rana P. Behal’s One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations
in Colonial Assam, an exhaustive study of the origin, working mechanism and labour and
production relations, argues that the plantation system was a combination of coercive
power structure, unregulated and often fraudulent immigration, penal contracts of
recruitment of labour, extra-legal authority of the planters, and periodic episodes of
violence, both planter violence and workers’ violent resistance.21 Nitin Verma’s meticu-
lous work Coolies of Capitalism is a notable contribution to the labour historiography on
tea plantations. Verma, in his own words, seeks to ‘explore the making of coolie labour
relationship not only as a broader homogenizing project of coerced labour under
capitalism but also seeks to explain its specific yet varied articulations’.22 Both Behal
and Verma study the new disciplinary mechanisms of control of labour to talk about
everyday forms of violence prevalent in the tea plantations in Assam. These scholars
show that the new drive to increase productivity in the capital intensive tea industry
contributed in the making of various strategies of intensification of labour through
disciplining and surveillance. One major innovation was the ‘garden-time,’ peculiar to
the tea plantations and ahead of the clock time of the rest of the empire. Further, strict
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 545

supervision of work through labour supervisors in the field and the factory, and the
creation of the figure and image of the manager on horseback, personally supervising
work in the plantations, were all parts of this disciplinary labour regime. Both Behal and
Verma also discuss how various labour legislation by the colonial state accorded the
planters/managers with a wide range of judicial powers, which in turn led to excessive
punitive actions taken by the latter in the names of enforcing work routine and punishing
defiance.
The historiography on tea plantations in colonial Assam has been dominated by works
on labour relations.23 These studies have demonstrated that violence was carried on by
a host of actors directly involved with the plantation economy, such as the European
planters, Bengali clerks, coolie sardars, local intermediaries, other plantation personnel,
depot functionaries, medical men and so on. Corporeal violence on the bodies of the
coolies was enabled, encouraged, and often accompanied by systemic and bureaucratic
violence facilitated by the judicial and bureaucratic organs of the colonial state. All of
these were done and permitted in the interest of the tea plantation industry, the flagship
capitalist venture of the colonial state. The existing scholarship has enriched our under-
standing about the more encompassing systemic, bureaucratic and ideological violence
that the coolies had to encounter, and the environment of violence that they were living
in. The impact of all these forms of violence was felt by land, labour, and landscapes
involved with the plantation economy, and not necessarily within the physical bound-
aries of the plantation estates. However, interestingly, the existing scholarship has limited
the aspect of corporeal violence on the labourers within the peripheries of the planta-
tions. This is probably due to the abundance of recorded instances of corporeal violence
unleashed on the bodies of the coolies within the tea plantations. What the existing
studies have not done is to talk about the permeation of corporeal violence to spaces and
coolies totally outside of the plantation production process.
This understanding about the limits of corporeal violence automatically treats the actual
acts of physical violence on the coolies as extreme examples of unfriendly labour conditions
in the colonial plantations and links them to the capitalistic nature of the plantation
industry. Although this approach explores the violence perpetrated on the coolies within
the greater schemes of colonialism, what it does instead is to mark only the plantation sites
as the ‘sites of exception’, in the same sense as Agamben theorises the ‘state of exception’,24
where such extreme corporeal violence was perpetrated and tolerated. Consequently, it also
trivialises (or rather hides), to a great degree, the violence that some coolies had to face
every day, even without being involved with the plantation economy. Even the radical take
on physical violence in the plantations, i.e., the chapter on tea plantation in Elizabeth
Kolsky’s seminal work Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law,
falls prey to the same historiographical trap. Her forceful observation is worth quoting here:

Viewed through the prism of the colonial tea plantation, the political foundations, cultural
conditions, and legitimizing functions that structured law and legal practice in British India
appear in bold relief. Although colonial law was described by officials as a guarantor of
liberty and agent of civilizational progress, in letter and in practice the law of the tea
plantations was designed to secure capitalist control over labour.25

One can quickly grasp what the intention of works such as Kolsky’s is. Her work brings
up the rather unexplored aspect of the endemic physical violence that was, for Kolsky, ‘an
546 J. BHARADWAJ

intrinsic feature of imperial rule’.26 However, as has been stated above, what even
Kolsky’s work does is to spatially limit physical violence and oppression on the
coolies within the physical boundaries of the plantations. The current paper contests
that notion, and with the evidence from a case from nineteenth-century Assam, extends
the limits of physical violence on the coolies beyond the physical setup of the plantations.
This paper differs from the existing historiography and asserts that the coolies were prone
to violence of the ‘plantation kind’ even if they were totally out of the plantation
production system. The argument that is being built up through the course of this
essay is that the physical violence and oppression on the bodies of the coolies were not
necessarily limited to the plantation production system. Even when many coolies left
their work on plantations for other work outside, they were still easy prey to violence in
many corners. The central case that this paper analyses, i.e., the case involving an act of
violence by Madan Mohan Biswas, helps us to argue that at least in this case, the
historiographical construction of the limits of physical violence on the coolies, within
the spatial and logical limit of the plantation production system, was broken. The paper,
therefore, proposes that histories of corporeal violence on labour in the colonial era need
to look beyond the peripheries of the plantations and towards the social regimes of power
under colonialism. The paper demonstrates the complicit character of the state and newly
landed and moneyed native classes in the colony, which aggravated the magnitudes of
corporeal violence on labour.27

Physical violence, coolies and the criminal courts: Looking at a criminal case
from colonial Assam
The case involving Madan Mohan Biswas, from the year 1891, presents us with many
interesting insights.28 The only source of information regarding the case available now,
are the High Court proceedings of the case. Madan Mohan Biswas, a powerful and
wealthy Bengali Babu from Nowgong District, was accused by three coolies, namely
Honto Lahang, Hoibori Lahingani, and Bagi Musalmani, of forcefully compelling them
to work in his farm, and also physically abusing them.29 Mr. Brodrick, the police officer in
charge of the district of Nowgong, reportedly received much information about the
mistreatment of coolies by Madan Mohan Biswas. Mr. Brodrick consequently visited
lands of Mr. Biswas, and also the coolie lines inside. During his visit, Mr. Brodrick met the
three complainants. The complainants complained that they were forcefully confined for
many days, made to work, and physically abused by Mr. Biswas. They alleged that they
were refused any wage for their labour, and on their refusal to work, they were subjected
to physical confinement and abuse by Mr. Madan Mohan Biswas. Mr. Brodrick prepared
a case diary upon completion of his investigation, which contained the details of the
complaints of the three complainants. Brodrick also mentioned that he saw marks of
violent physical abuse on the persons of the three complainants. The case diary provides
an unusually long and detailed treatment of the case. Mr. Brodrick made an enterprising
effort. He sent the complainants and several others to give depositions in the Sudder
police station at Nowgong. The case diary presents us with information that arrange-
ments were made for the complainants to stay in the Sudder station for a quite long time,
till the trial was complete. It is interesting and curious to notice, as these type of treatment
of cases involving violence against the coolies was rare.
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 547

The Court hearings of the case began on 2 September 1891, when Madan Mohan Biswas
was first produced before the Court of the Deputy Commissioner, Nowgong. Mr. Gray, the
then Deputy Commissioner of Nowgong, heard the three chief complainants and various
witnesses produced by the police from 2nd September to 19th September. Upon hearing the
three complainants, namely Honto Lahang, Hoibori Lahingani, and Bagi Musalmani, and
the witnesses for the complainants, Mr. Gray framed three charges against Mr. Biswas. The
three charges were: forceful detention of the three complainants as slaves, wrongfully
confining the complainants for periods considerably extending beyond ten days, and
unlawfully compelling the complainants to work for him for a long time against their
will, which were punishable offences under the Sections 370, 344 and 374 of the Indian
Penal Code respectively.30 The complainants and the witnesses were then heard and cross-
examined again in the Court, from 19th to 28th September. Interestingly, no witnesses or
evidence was produced for the defense. The Deputy Commissioner passed his judgement
on 28th of September convicting the accused on all the charges that he was charged with and
sentenced him to rigorous imprisonment for one year and a fine of rupees five hundred.
The sentence by the Deputy Commissioner of Nowgong, if scrutinised, would be found to
be too mild considering the charges. The ambiguous phrase ‘imprisonment of either
description for a term’ in the above mentioned section of the Indian Penal Code was
cleverly used to pronounce the judgment with the mere penalty of imprisonment for
one year. Except for the last of the three charges where the provision existed for
a maximum of one year of imprisonment, the other two charges under Sections 370 and
344 had provisions for imprisonment up to seven and three years respectively. It is also
interesting that the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1882, mandated that the Deputy
Commissioners Courts were empowered to pass such a sentence, with further confirmation
needed from the Sessions Court.31
Given that the Deputy Commissioner’s Court sentenced the accused only with
rigorous imprisonment for a year and a fine of rupees five hundred, the sentence did
not necessarily need any confirmation from the Court of the Sessions Judge, according to
the provision of the Criminal Procedure Code of 1882. However, the case took a curious
turn when the prisoner appealed in the Court of A. A. Wace, the then Sessions Judge of
the Assam Valley Districts. The appeal was heard, and on the 14th of November, 1891,
Mr. Wace pronounced his verdict reversing the initial judgment of the court of the first
instance on the first two charges, but upholding it on the third charge, i.e., that of the
current plaintiff unlawfully compelling the three labourers to labour. The Sessions Judge
had reportedly pointed out that that the charges of complainants being forcefully
detained as slaves and wrongfully confined could not stand since the complainants did
not report so to the police. The verdict, by the Sessions Judge of the Assam Valley
districts, reportedly contained the following observation:

There is ample evidence on the record to show that Madan Mohan Biswas has been in the
habit of getting people into his meshes by loans, working on their ignorance and trading on
the traditions of serfdom, which still exist among the lowest classes of the province, and
getting them into his power ‘adscripti gleba’ [sic.] as it were. The process with such people as
those called for the prosecution is easy enough, a magnified debt, an offer to waive this for
service, the supply of the little daily wants of a lazy people in rice, oil and opium, the non-
payment of wages, which works a terrible bondage; for when a man has been serving long
548 J. BHARADWAJ

without wages, he is afraid to do anything which might result in forfeiture of past service,
and dismissal without payment of any arrears, and he hangs on such with hope deferred.32

The judgment by the Sessions Judge, Assam Valley districts, very carefully indicated that
though such malpractices were regularly resorted to by Madan Mohan Biswas, and there
had been clear evidence of such malpractice in the current case, yet that would not be
enough for conviction in the offences of forceful detention as slaves and wrongful
confinement of the three main complainants. The Sessions Judge was subtly indicating
that there was an element of consent by the complainants involved, irrespective of
whether that consent was voluntary or extracted from the complainants through force
or fraud. It is interesting to notice that the Deputy Commissioner’s Court convicted the
accused in three charges under Sections 370, 344 and 374 of the Indian Penal Code
respectively, and sentenced him with rigorous imprisonment for one year and a fine of
rupees five hundred. The Sessions Court convicted the accused only for the single offence
of unlawfully compelling the complainants to work, and yet sentenced him with exactly
the same punishment.
The Crown, reportedly, did not appeal in the High Court against the acquittal of the
accused in the two charges of forceful detention as slaves and wrongful confinement of
the three main complainants.33 Instead, a High Court Ruling was obtained on behalf of
the accused Madan Mohan Biswas on the 8th of February 1892, to set aside the verdict of
the Court of the Sessions Judge, Assam Valley districts. This Ruling, granted by two
Calcutta High Court Judges, Mr. Justice Hill and Mr. Justice Beverley, asked the
Government to show cause why the prisoner Madan Mohan Biswas should not be
vindicated of conviction of the charges under section 374 of the Indian Penal Code,
given that the other two charges on the prisoner under Sections 370 and 344 of the Indian
Penal Code were already annulled by the Court of the Sessions Judge, Assam Valley
districts. This Rule was argued before a bench at the Calcutta High Court, comprising
Mr. Justice Beverley and Mr. Justice Norris. Justice Beverley opined that the High Court
Ruling should be made absolute, and the conviction of the accused by the Sessions Judge
should be annulled, ‘first, on the ground that the proceedings were irregularly conducted,
and that the accused was thereby prejudiced on his trial; and secondly, because in my
opinion the evidence is not sufficient to establish an offence under Section 374, Penal
Code’.34 Some critical parts of Justice Beverley’s verdict are quoted below:

In the first place the Magistrate, though professing to try the accused in respect of three
persons only, has admitted a considerable quantity of evidence in respect of other persons,
and has used that evidence against the accused. He has in fact examined nine of the persons
who are said to have been illegally confined, detained as slaves, and unlawfully compelled to
work, and has used their statements regarding themselves as corroborating the statements of
the others. Beyond the statements of these persons (mostly women), there is no independent
evidence of the charges against the accused. The statements themselves are full of gross
contradictions and exaggerations, and bear the impress of having been tutored.

But even if the evidence be believed, I do not think it is sufficient to prove the offence. What
is alleged is that these people used to work for the accused; that they were fed by him, but
received no money wages because advances were said to be due from them; that they were
watched while at work by a chaprassy [sic.] or duffadar [sic.] to see that they did not idle or
run away, and that they were secured at night in a mat hut, the jhamp [sic.] doors of which
opened inside; the accused himself keeping guard over them all night and never going to
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 549

sleep. The Judge himself has disbelieved a great part of the evidence; but he has upheld the
conviction under Section 374 apparently on the ground that by magnifying their debts to
him and never settling their accounts the accused has unlawfully compelled these people to
go on working for him against their wills. I very much doubt whether this amounts to
“unlawful compulsion” such as will subject the offender to a criminal penalty under Section
374, Penal Code.35

Mr. Justice Norris stood in contrast and opined that the Ruling should be annulled, and
the conviction should be upheld. The bench could not pronounce a unanimous judg-
ment, as the two judges gave entirely opposing verdicts on the Ruling. Hence, a new
bench, comprising of Justice Norris, Justice Beverley, and the then Chief Justice,
C. J. Petharam, was constituted to hear the Ruling. The Ruling, re-heard before the
High Court bench comprising of the three Judges, reduced the entire case into a matter of
legal and procedural validity, and carefully undermined the testimonies of the three main
complainants and the witnesses. Chief Justice Petharam opined, regarding the main
concern of the re-hearing of the Ruling at the High Court, as follows:

. . . the complainants have for some consideration or other consented to remain in the
prisoner’s employ, being housed and fed by him, and that as far as actual physical restraint
went they might have gone away at any time, and I think I ought to add that upon the
evidence, as it appears on this record, the conclusion at which the District Judge has arrived
appears to me to be the correct one.

The question, then, is whether a person who has induced other persons to consent to live in
his premises, and to be fed by him as his servants, commits an offence under Section 374 of
the Penal Code if he insists upon their working, and punishes them by beating them if they
do not do so.36

The meticulous descriptions of the court proceedings during the four consecutive hearings
of this case recorded the actual facts of violence perpetrated on the three complainants, and
also their associates. The complainants and the witnesses repeatedly accused Mr. Biswas of
utter brutality, and exploitation. However, the Court proceedings carry a sense that the
statements of the three main complainants and their associates, who came and complained
about the physical abuse and violence that was meted to them, were undermined. In the test
of the official Court culture, the statements of the complainants and their associates could
hardly be enough as hard and convincing evidence. It is interesting to note how, with the
help of legal jargon and technicalities, interpretations were manipulated to favour the
dominant party. There was clear judicial trivialisation of the charges, from forceful deten-
tion as slaves and unlawful physical confinement against the will of the concerned persons,
to merely a case of forceful compulsion to labour, which the complainants once ‘consented’
to perform for the accused under varied circumstances regarded to be not significant in the
particular case. The Chief Justice presided the final bench at the High Court, which
eventually gave the binding verdict of acquittal of all the charges. Apart from Mr. Justice
Norris, the Chief Justice and Justice Beverley repeatedly expressed their concerns over the
witness statements against Mr. Biswas, and also the lack of any other independent evidence
apart from the complainants’ and witnesses’ statements. Chief Justice Petharam opined as
follows:

Other witnesses were called who said that they themselves and the three persons in respect
of whom the charges are made had been kept in confinement and compelled to work, but the
550 J. BHARADWAJ

evidence of the compelling to work is very general, and the evidence of the other witnesses
does not carry the case further than that of the three complainants themselves.37

Chief Justice Petharam’s verdict contained more clever interpretations and judicial
manipulations. The following quote from the sentence of the Chief Justice deserves
a mention too:

There is, I fear, no doubt that assaults on servants and labourers in this country are by no
means uncommon, and there is equally no doubt that such assaults are offences for which
the persons guilty of them are liable to punishment under the criminal law, and this cannot
be too widely known; but I do not think that a person who insists that another who has
consented to serve him shall perform his work, unlawfully compels such person to labour,
because it is the thing which he or she has agreed to do, and although if the employer assault
the servant for not working to his satisfaction, he undoubtedly renders himself liable to
rigorous, imprisonment under section 352 of the Penal Code, I do not think he thereby
commits an offence under section 374.38

Justice Norris alone stood to his ground and opposed the opinion of the other two
members of the bench. He observed:

I very much regret that I am unable to concur in the judgment which has just been pronounced
by the Chief Justice. I have read very carefully the whole of the evidence on the record, and that
evidence, if true, seems to me to warrant the conviction under Section 374. Two Courts have
believed that evidence. It stands uncontradicted, and I see no reason for discrediting it. On the
evidence on the record, I have come to the conclusion that these three persons never did give
their full and free consent to work and labour for the accused. In my opinion, therefore, the
conviction in this case was right, and this rule ought to be discharged.39

The conviction was termed to be erroneous, and the verdict of acquittal was eventually
passed by a majority of two judges to one judge. Chief Justice Petharam and Justice
Beverley opined that the conviction should be set aside citing logical fallacy in the
sentence of the Judge of the Assam Valley districts which acquitted the prisoner of two
charges while ruling him guilty of one charge. Ironically, all the judges in this case, from
the court of the first instance to the final three-member High Court bench, acknowledged
that coolies encountered such extreme exploitation in multiple regions. While none of the
judges expressed any doubt over the authenticity of the happenings, loopholes were
found in the procedures.
The purpose of the current essay is to talk about the inadequate historiographical
attention given so far on aspects of violence and physical exploitation perpetrated on the
bodies of the coolies. This experience of excessive corporeal violence, so far taken for
granted in the historiography, also helps in establishing violence as an inherent element
of experiences under European colonialism. Administrative and judicial apathy and racist
bias towards the coolie was an inherent reality in nineteenth-century Assam, and British
India in general. Often, clear cases of nexus between planters and the law enforcing officials
made the situation more fertile for such abuses either being judicially covered up or
encouraged. The apathy of the administrative and the judicial machinery was visible in
systemic and procedural manipulations, neglect in following the rules, and often in blatant
refusal to accept coolie cases on their appearances. The physical violence and subjugation of
the coolies in the colonial tea plantations were greatly aided by active collaboration with the
judicial machinery and the colonial state. With an actively colluding state enabling such
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 551

physical violence on the coolies, and a judicial system openly biased against the cause of the
coolies, a sense of impunity and a ‘model of violence’, often to be perpetrated on the bodies
of the coolies, were created. Consequently, physical violence on the coolies travelled even
outside of the territorial boundaries of the tea plantations, and perpetrators were not
necessarily European planters/managers. A couple of such coolie cases that reached the
criminal courts of the colonial state at the provincial and Presidency level are discussed in
the following section, to attempt an in-depth analysis of systematic judicial bias and the
procedural violations it encouraged.

Coolie cases and the colonial courts: racist bias and judicial apathy
On the 23 December 1865, a coolie was allegedly beaten to death by a Eurasian named
Mr. Haynes, an officer in a company named Saw Mills Company Limited.40 The coolie was
employed in a garden owned by the Dehing Tea Company in the district of Sibsagar.
Initially, the case only got a mention in the yearly Police Report for the year 1865, and no
further correspondence was made to the Bengal Government or the High Court. The
Bengal Government asked the Commissioner of Assam for a separate report regarding the
case through Government Resolution on 28 August 1866. The Report of the Commissioner
of Assam with more details on the conduct of investigations by the concerned British
officers forms the chief source of evidence for us to read about the case.41 This report
contained excerpts of the reports provided by the Deputy Commissioner in charge of
Sibsagar and other official correspondence. The Commissioner’s Report highlights that the
entire trial almost became a joke as the biases of the Deputy Commissioner were visible.
One of the problems cited as causing severe inconvenience in the trial of the case was that
the Deputy Commissioner could not place much reliance on the depositions of the
witnesses. Eight fellow labourers of the victim came as witnesses and gave their statements.
The Deputy Commissioner, while hearing the witnesses, found it extremely difficult ‘to
elicit the actual facts of the case from the evidence given by eight labourers on the saw
mills’.42 Six of the eight witnesses were ‘Madrassees,’ and could speak only Telugu. The
Deputy Commissioner in the process of the trial arranged for the translation of their
statements from Telugu to Hindustani by another ‘Madrassee’ labourer, but found that
the latter’s knowledge of Hindustani was also very indifferent.
The Assam Commissioner’s report mentions that all the witnesses deposed that the
deceased had met with his death due to the excessively cruel treatment unleashed by
the accused Mr. Haynes. The omission of the words ‘beaten to death’ in this phase of
the Commissioner’s report, which was used in the beginning of the report in passé, is
also noteworthy. To come back to the statements of the witnesses, the Deputy
Commissioner, however, found that the witnesses were making ‘contradictory and
inconsistent statements’ in narrating the details of the occurrence. The
Commissioner’s report too emphasises the point without really delineating the contra-
diction and the inconsistencies in the witnesses’ statements. Eventually, the Deputy
Commissioner conveniently ignored all the witnesses’ statements unequivocally stating
that the deceased was brutally killed by the Eurasian Manager of the Saw Mills,
Mr. Haynes. The Deputy Commissioner, while hearing the witnesses, was reportedly
‘unable to place sufficient reliance on them to enable him to convict the prisoner of
murder’.43 Mr. Haynes was subsequently acquitted of the charge of murder on the
552 J. BHARADWAJ

pretext of lack of evidence. However, he was subsequently re-arrested on a charge of

causing hurt to the deceased. The Commissioner’s Report shows that Mr. Haynes was
later tried for the latter crime he was charged with, and was found guilty ‘partially on
his own admission’. The utter mockery of the supposedly emancipating, impersonal
and equal space of the British Rule of Law came in the punishment eventually meted
out to Mr. Haynes. He was sentenced to pay a fine of two hundred rupees as
punishment for the offence of causing hurt to the deceased.
The main accused was eventually acquitted of all the principal charges against him.
The complacency shown by, firstly, the Deputy Commissioner of Sibsagar while hearing
the case first hand, and then by the Commissioner of Assam by not forwarding the case
involving a heinous crime such as a murder to the High Court at Calcutta and also by
vehemently supporting the proceedings and conduct of the case by the Deputy
Commissioner, are too hard to miss. The Commissioner, although indirectly admitted
the chances of a ‘failure of justice’, was however not ready for further proceedings in the
case. The Judicial Commissioner, too, conveniently agreed with the trial conducted by
the Deputy Commissioner and the eventual outcome of the case. The proceedings of the
case were forwarded to the Judicial Commissioner of Assam by the Commissioner for his
record and remarks, and the Judicial Commissioner, too, albeit implicitly, agreed to the
severe irregularity and incoherence in the proceedings of the first trial, and the inade-
quacy of the first-hand investigation done by Mr. Jenkins, the Honorary Magistrate of
Sibsagar. The Judicial Commissioner had every right to interfere judicially, and ask for
a re-hearing of the case on the part of the High Court under Section 434 of the Code of
Criminal Procedure.44 However, neither the Commissioner nor the Judicial
Commissioner of Assam thought this to be necessary. The Bengal Government, too,
agreed to the depositions of the Commissioner of Assam in his thin reference to
a possible ‘failure of justice’, but did not agree to a revision hearing of the case at the
appellate court. The Bengal Government, as well as the provincial Commissioner and the
Judicial Commissioner, were more worried about remedial measures to control the
possible resentment amongst the fellow workers in the Saw Mills.
Another important case was the case of flogging to death of a coolie named Lalsa by
a planter named Mr. Bain, in early 1903. The case was reported in the famous documenta-
tion on the labour system by noted British peace activist and humanitarian Hypatia
Bradlaugh Bonner.45 Lalsa and two of his fellow female coolies were allegedly ‘recaptured’
after they deserted their original employment site. The flogging by Mr. Bain was so severe
that Lalsa reportedly lost consciousness and later succumbed. The case created an uproar in
the Calcutta Press, and the nationalists took up the case to point to the inhuman exploita-
tion prevalent in the colonial tea plantations in Assam, and to criticise the colonial
Government’s role in the process. The public outcry eventually compelled the colonial
state and judiciary to take note of the case. The mockery of colonial justice started when the
case was heard in the Court of the Sessions Judge at Sylhet, on the 20th of February, 1903.
A European Judge, and a Jury comprising of five Europeans, among whom four were
planters, heard the case. The planter-dominated Jury found the charges against Mr. Bain
too severe. Mr. Bain was acquitted of the charge of culpable homicide and was instead
convicted of an offence of inflicting ‘simple hurt’ on the deceased.46 The accused was
sentenced to simple imprisonment for six months.
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 553

However, the case took many more exciting turns after the initial verdict by the Court of
the Sessions Judge, Sylhet. Media and public attention, and the public outcry regarding the
case compelled the colonial Government to relook at the proceedings of the case. The Bengal
government found the case to be mishandled by the investigating officer, and the Court of
the first instance, the Court of the Sessions Judge, Sylhet, and observed that the sentence was
too light given the nature of the crime committed by the accused. The Chief Commissioner
of Assam was consequently instructed by the Bengal Government to move the High Court at
Calcutta for an enhancement of the sentence, or to provide an explanation should he deem it
unnecessary to move the High Court. The Chief Commissioner of Assam was opposed to
any enhancement of the sentence. The explanation furnished by him was reportedly found to
be insufficient by the Bengal Government. The Advocate- General was asked to appeal to the
High Court against the acquittal of the accused on the more serious charge of culpable
homicide, and the accused's sentencing instead on a much lighter offence. On appeal of the
Advocate- General, the case was heard by a bench consisting of a European and a native
judge. The bench held the Sessions Judge responsible for materially misdirecting the Jury in
respect to grave charges of culpable homicide and murder against the accused Mr. Bain, and
ordered a fresh trial at the High Court. The fresh hearing was scheduled to be heard by
Mr. Justice Sale, a Judge at the Calcutta High Court, on 31 August 1903. However, several
unexpected developments took place on the scheduled day of the new trial. Curiously, it was
stated that Mr. Justice Sale, on his own capacity, looked through the entire available
proceedings of the case. Mr. Justice Sale, reportedly, voiced a strong opinion concerning
Mr. Bain’s innocence in this case. Consequently, the Advocate- General, allegedly, refused to
go ahead with the trial and took back the appeal. The case was dropped, and the accused was
acquitted without any new hearing.
Such cases were not rare. Instead, it was repeatedly asserted in contemporary colonial
and the nationalist circles that numerous episodes of planters’ violence went unnoticed,
or unreported, precisely due to the seclusion of the tea plantations, and the repressive
measures regularly adopted by the planters to cover up or brush aside such news.47 The
penal contract system in the plantations in colonial Assam gave the planters/managers
the right to private arrest in cases of desertion, and also the right to impose some sort of
punishment. Therefore, while some acts of desertion were tried and convicted by the law
enforcing authorities of the state, many were actually dealt with by the planters/managers
themselves. The archive is abysmally poor in recording these incidents, apart from
reducing them to numbers. One can only speculate how many of these were actual
cases of desertion and whether the planters were covering up for their brutal physical
abuse and violence under the justification of punishment for acts of desertion.48 The
remote and secluded tea plantations often contained countless reported and unreported
episodes of extreme violence perpetrated on the bodies of the coolies.49

Conclusion
There are numerous examples of corporeal violence on the coolie populace without even
the basic pretext of enforcing discipline for routine work. Numerous examples of
Europeans, both planters as well as those of other sections, assaulting and physically
abusing the coolies bore testimony to the fact that the latter were prone to be subjected to
the worst form of violence by white Europeans on various pretexts.50 The criminal justice
554 J. BHARADWAJ

system of the colonial state legalised, protected, shielded, and occasionally mildly pun-
ished European offenders, and, thereby, created a sense of impunity for many Europeans
and wealthy natives that they could get away with even extreme sort of violence
perpetrated on the coolies.51 Violence was often doubled; physical violence regularly
inflicted upon the coolies was frequently accompanied by the violence unleashed by an
unsympathetic and biased legal regime, which often discriminated against the coolie,
subtly or bluntly.
What is interesting to note is that the particular case involving Madan Mohan Biswas
got tremendous judicial and official attention, and attracted lengthy court proceedings,
which was not usual in many cases of offence and violence perpetrated on the bodies of
the coolies. There are ample evidence to suggest that judicial and punitive powers
entrusted with the European planters either justified or normalised many such cases of
physical violence on the coolies within the peripheries of the plantations, and perhaps
many cases did not actually reach the courts of the state. Even when the coolie cases
reached the law-enforcing authorities and the courts of the state, trial processes were
adversely biased against the coolies, as demonstrated by the three coolie cases from the tea
plantations that this paper analyses. The difference lies in the fact that while there
probably were countless episodes of physical violence on the coolies within the planta-
tions, the numbers would understandably be less outside of the plantations. Moreover,
coolie cases from outside of the plantation peripheries had a better chance of receiving
relatively fair judicial treatments vis-à-vis the blatant disregard for law and procedures
exhibited in many coolie cases from the plantations.
It is quite possible, with the help of the particular case involving Madan Mohan Biswas,
to comment on the overall colonial rule in Assam. This essay seeks to locate the aspect of
physical violence as an integral question in the historiography of colonial rule in Assam.52
Apart from that, this particular case also helps us to critically look at the actuality of the
operation of the imperial Rule of Law, which, in the words of Nasser Hussain, was the
‘settled theoretical standard of colonial politics’.53 The primary argument put forward by
many postcolonial scholars is that the British colonial rule in the subcontinent was highly
racist and exclusionary. Racist essence was intact even within the domain of the Rule of
Law, despite its proclaimed impersonality and egalitarian ethos. The point to look at here is
to how the entire discourse on the superior efficacy of the new British Rule of Law, which, as
Anindita Mukhopadhyay identifies, was ‘part of the imperial agenda’ and which was
highlighted as an ‘institutional legal form which upheld an idealised egalitarian order,’54
got compromised with manipulations and aberrations. The difference between the theore-
tical promise of the Rule of Law and the actual manifestations on the ground forms a critical
angle to look at particularly the claims of universality and egalitarian ethos of the British
Rule of Law, and the entire history of colonialism.
Partha Chatterjee emphasises that the history of the colonial rule in India can be seen
through the framework of the making of ‘a rule of colonial difference’.55 Chatterjee
argues that for the apparent imperial interests, the colonial state continued to insist on
the fundamental difference between the coloniser and the colonised, even while making
repeated claims and promises of modern egalitarian ideas and institutions. This rule of
colonial difference distorted all claims of establishing modern governmental modalities
in the colonies. This line of argument portrays the contradiction within the British Rule of
Law, and points to the fact that discrimination and racist assumptions were kept intact
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 555

within the domain of the Rule of Law. The aberrations from the professed claims of
impersonality, universality and egalitarianism of the British Rule of Law were neither
unusual nor exceptional. Uday Singh Mehta furthers this point with his insistence on
demonstrating the profound inconsistency between Lockean universalism – which was at
the base of British liberal ideas forming the liberal political doctrine, and the ideas
managing imperial governance, which were necessarily exclusionary.56 Colonial law,
being the chief operation rationale of the imperial edifice, inherently carried this
inconsistency.
The central case in question, involving a wealthy Bengali man Madan Mohan Biswas,
accused of exercising torture and physical abuse on the bodies of several coolies, adds into
this line of arguments. It also helps in complicating the simplistic reading of the nature of
colonial relations as only between the oppressive Europeans vis-à-vis the subjugated
natives, in talking about the colonial experience in Assam. This essay, with the help of
the case in question, complicates the idea of the rule of colonial difference, by suggesting the
idea of multiple foci of power in the colonial context. Distinction and discrimination on
racial lines, an inherent essence of the colonial relations, got reinvented and reproduced in
multiple other forms, contexts and levels, and often overlapped with other categories of
distinctions on the lines of class and caste. This influenced the social hierarchies, and in
turn influenced even colonial institutions in the forms of institutional access, official bias
and prejudices, procedural manipulations, etc. Wealthy natives like Madan Mohan Biswas
could exercise extreme physical violence on the bodies of the destitute coolies and could
access and manipulate the system of the criminal justice administration, unlike the vulner-
able sections of the society. On the other hand, different scales of justice was being meted
out for discrimination at different levels. In the first case that the paper discusses, the
defendant was a member of the new Indian landed gentry, while the defendants in the other
three cases were either Eurasians or Europeans. Unlike the principal case, the trial processes
in the latter three cases do not appear to have proceeded very far. Therefore, multiple levels
of discrimination and subjugation was an inherent reality of the colonial experience. This
essay, much in line with the arguments of the studies referred above, questions the
neutrality and objectivity of the Rule of Law, which was the benchmark operation rationale
of British colonialism. It critiques the proclaimed impersonal and morally superior colonial
Rule of Law, and projects discrimination, of different nature and layers, as the main essence
of colonial Rule of Law.

Notes
1. Encountering problems of epidemics morbid mortality, and occasional reports of excessive
exploitation and pathetic working conditions in the tea plantations, the colonial state, from
the late nineteenth century, started to prepare Labour Immigration Reports for Assam.
These yearly Reports, albeit with definite colonial interests, often used to briefly cover all
areas related to the tea plantations and the lives in the plantations. These reports have been
invaluable source materials for historians to study the history of tea plantations and colonial
Assam in general. Two other kinds of colonial reports are crucial for the study of conditions
of labour in colonial Assam. The annually published official Statement Exhibiting the Moral
and Material Progress and Condition of India also contained significant sections dealing with
tea plantation labour. The Royal Commission on Labour, set up in the year 1929 to enquire
into the labour conditions in India, submitted voluminous reports on the labour conditions
556 J. BHARADWAJ

in plantations and other industries in British India. Many colonial administrators, European
planters, missionaries, and other Europeans also produced memoirs, books, and testimonies
on tea plantations and the life therein. For example, see, Samuel Baildon, The Tea Industry
in India: A Review of Finance and Labour, and a Guide for Capitalists and Assistants,
London: W. H. Allen and Company, 1882, and George M. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in
Assam, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Company, 1884. For the current paper, these official
reports, books, and memoirs are not considered to be independent inquiries into the aspects
of the conditions of labour in the tea plantations in Assam, due to the colonial nature of
these works.
2. His reports and observations came as a single compiled version much later, in the year 1959.
See Ganguli, Slavery in British Dominion.
3. Vidyaratna, Coolykahini: Sketches from Cooly Life. Vidyaratna dedicated his work to
Dwarkanath Ganguli, and acknowledged the latter’s immense contribution in the
growing awareness and study of the labour conditions in the tea plantations in colonial
Assam.
4. Purcell and Hallsworth, Report on Labour Conditions in India.
5. Ibid., 33–36.
6. Lall, Coolie: The Story of Labour and Capital in India.
7. Diwan Chaman Lall was a member of the Royal Commission on Labour, established
specifically to investigate and report on the conditions of labour in the industries in India.
See, Royal Commission on Labour in India, Evidence, Vols. I to XI, London: His Majesty’s
Stationary Office, 1929, 1930 and 1931.
8. Das, Plantation Labour in India.
9. Ibid., 91.
10. For a brilliant exposition of historiography on the unfreedom of labour in South Asia, and
a meticulous survey of critical labour histories on South Asian labour, see William van
Schendel, “Stretching Labour Historiography: Ideas from South Asia,” in Behal and van der
Linden, eds., Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History.
11. Gupta, “Plantation labour in colonial India.”
12. Sharit K. Bhowmik, “Introduction,” in Bhowmik, Xaxa and Kalam, Tea Plantation Labour in
India.
13. Ibid. Many studies on the global capitalist economy in the era of European colonialism
register a similar notion. Philip Curtin regards coerced labour, ensured through outright
slavery or indentured workers entering into penal contracts, and the plantation manage-
ment acquiring many of the legal and punitive functions of the state, as two of the defining
characteristics in the colonial plantations in many parts of the colonised world. See Curtin,
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex.
14. For more examples, See, Chatterjee and Das Gupta, “Tea-Labour in Assam.”
15. Guha, Planter- Raj to Swaraj, 40–47.
16. Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, 147–8.
17. Ibid., 142–84.
18. Sen, “Unsettling the Household.” 135–56.
In another crucial work, Sen has studied the penetrative role of the colonial state and
colonial law over the lives of the labourers. Sen has highlighted the intertwining of marriage
and labour. Sen’s works are crucial to understand layers of subjugation and the notion of
individual agency in the case of the female coolies. See, Sen, “Without His Consent?” 77–104.
19. Wright, “Gender, Violence, and Justice in Colonial Assam.”
20. Ibid., 1.
21. Behal, One Hundred Years of Servitude.
22. Verma, Coolies of Capitalism.
23. See, for further examples, Chattopadhyay, “Labour Migration and Labour Recruitment in
the Tea- Plantation of North- East India”; and Behal and Mohapatra, “Tea and Money
versus Human Life,” 142–72. Two recent works by Jayeeta Sharma and Piya Chatterjee have
brought in some fresh insights into the study of the tea plantations. Jayeeta Sharma’s
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 557

Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India locates the colonial tea plantations within
the larger colonial logic of improvement and progress, and situates the socio-political and
cultural changes introduced with the advent of colonial modernity in Assam. In her own
words, “My subject is a febrile milieu where migratory and local groups generated, con-
tested, and modified a host of identities around place, people, and community nodes
alongside the immense changes that colonial modernity brought for Assam and India.
Multiple improvement agendas inspired the locals and migrants looking to circulate and
mobilise around new and remade identities, even as the colonial establishment shaped
Assam into a commodity- producing garden space.” Violence in the plantations was, for
Sharma, a constitutive element of the entire process, and attracts only a brief discussion in
her book. See Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India.
Piya Chatterjee’s A Time for Tea, an anthropological work on a plantation in North Bengal,
initiates a refreshingly new and much-needed discussion about women labourers in the tea
plantations, sexualised nature of female labour and bodily experiences of the female
labourers. Chatterjee’s work brings in a lot of historically situated insights into the working
of the tea plantations in colonial times as well. Chatterjee emphasises, “Histories, imperial
and subterranean, fold into each other, and I will, in the narratives that follow, search for the
strands of a longue duree that connect corporeal memories and practices to larger global
processes and the material themes they entail. An ethnography of the quotidian, privileging
the pragmatic and contemporary worlds of women and men working in the tea fields of
North Bengal, will constitute the narrative seedbed of the book. It will, however, be in
constant play with the colonial and imperial histories that continue to imbue the structural
compulsions of plantation production.” Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 4.
Arnab Dey’s latest work Tea Environment and Plantation Culture has brought in
a refreshing approach to study the tea plantations in colonial eastern India, Assam to be
specific. Dey claims to reconstruct an ‘agro-ecological history’ of the tea plantations where
agronomic sciences, colonial capital, local environment, law, human and non-human
factors such as plants and pests interacted and constituted the plantation culture. Dey
calls the tea plantation enterprise in colonial Assam as essentially a ‘knowledge economy,’
‘a congeries of ideological, scientific, and legal interests that did not always converge, or
control opinion and outcome’. Dey proposes the heuristic and analytical frame of ‘disarray’
to map the essence and nature of this disorder signifying the tea enterprise in colonial
Assam, and argues that the disarray ‘ultimately manifested itself in harsh working condi-
tions, tea pests, disease environments, labour mortality, wage manipulation, felled forests,
and lawlessness’ in the plantations. Dey, Tea Environments and Plantation Culture.
24. Agamben situates the state of exception in contexts and times when sovereign power
suspends the regular application of the law due to situations of emergency or political
necessity. Agamben’s theorisation of the state of exception is developed on the idea of
inclusion through exclusion. He defines the exception as ‘the extreme form of relation by
which something is included solely through its exclusion’. Therefore, the simplistic distinc-
tion between legal and extra-legal is decisively blurred. The sovereign power, clearly beyond
the juridical order due to its power of levying and suspending the law, also belongs to the
juridical order. He theorised, ‘The state of exception is neither external nor internal to the
juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of
indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each
other.’ In Agambenian theory, the ‘state of exception’ lies precisely in this ‘unlocalizable’
space of ‘indifference’, often being constituted by the sovereign power arbitrating between
political fact and public law. Paradoxically, in the state of exception, law encompasses living
beings through its own suspension. The suspension of law, in its turn, places the living
beings within the juridical order defined by law. See, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer;
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception.
Conceptualising the colonial tea plantations in Assam as ‘state of exception’ in the
Agambenian sense would require one to look at the magisterial and policing powers allotted
to the managers of the tea plantations within the periphery of their own gardens. The vast
558 J. BHARADWAJ

and isolated tea gardens in colonial Assam, with resident indentured labourers forcefully
settled in the ‘coolie lines,’ became the sites appropriate for mostly the European planters/
managers to exercise virtually unlimited powers over their contracted labourers. Physical
coercion became integral to the assertion of the authority of the sahibs over the labourers in
daily life on the plantations. The motive was to keep the labourers tamed, intimidated, and
disciplined. Disciplining the ‘unruly coolies’ for ‘efficient work routine and better produc-
tivity’ became the most used historical pretext for the planters to exercise excessive physical
coercion and violence on the bodies of the workers. By delegating the power of adminis-
tering justice to the planters, the colonial state devised the plantations as spaces virtually
beyond the reach of its law and order, but within the colonial state itself. The distinction
between law and lawlessness became regularly blurred, with the whims of the planters often
being the law in the plantations. Plantation violence was treated as ‘exceptional’ and
disciplinary although it was in reality normalised. See Rana P. Behal & Prabhu
P. Mohapatra, ‘Tea and money versus human life’; Rana P. Behal, One Hundred Years of
Servitude.
25. Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, 147.
26. Ibid., 1.
27. In the initial years of British reign in Assam, all the lands and power and authority of the
traditional landed aristocracy under the precolonial Ahom regime were curtailed. There
were severe oppositions to the aggressive British policies against the traditional landed elites.
By the later part of the nineteenth-century, the traditional landed aristocracy lost all its
privileges and social prominence. The vacuum was gradually filled in by the emerging
literary elites and the newly landed and moneyed classes who rose to prominence with the
expansion of the administrative and industrial capitalist ventures of the colonial state in the
province. See, Barpujari, Assam in the Days of the Company.
28. Madan Mohan Biswas (Petitioner) v. Queen- Empress.
29. Ibid., 573.
30. Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, concerning ‘Buying or disposing of any
person as a slave’, stated, “Whoever imports, exports, removes, buys, sells or disposes of any
person as a slave, or accepts, receives or detains against his will any person as a slave, shall be
punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven
years, and shall also be liable to fine.” Section 344 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860,
concerning ‘Wrongful confinement for ten or more days’, mandated, “Whoever wrongfully
confines any person for ten days, or more, shall be punished with imprisonment of either
description for a term which may extend to three years, and shall also be liable to fine.”
Section 374 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, concerning ‘Unlawful compulsory labor’,
ruled, “Whoever unlawfully compels any person to labor against the will of that person, shall
be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to
one year, or with fine, or with both.” See, Sections 370, 344 and 374 of the Indian Penal
Code, Act XLV of the year 1860.
31. Section 34 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1882, mandated the following: “The Court of
a District Magistrate specially empowered under section 30 may pass any sentence of
imprisonment for a term not exceeding seven years, including such solitary confinement
as is authorised by law, or of fine, or of whipping, or of any combination of these punish-
ments authorised by law. But any sentence of imprisonment for a term exceeding three years
passed by any such Court shall be subject to the confirmation of the Sessions Judge.” See,
Agnew and Henderson, The Code of Criminal Procedure, 23–24.
32. Madan Mohan Biswas (Petitioner) v. Queen- Empress, (1892), 580.
33. Ibid., 580.
34. Ibid., 574–5.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 580.
37. Ibid., 579.
38. Ibid., 581.
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 559

39. Ibid., 582.

40. Letter from the Hon’ble A. Eden, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the
Commissioner of Assam, No. 2893T., dated Darjeeling the 8 October 1866.
41. Letter from Lieutenant Colonel H. Hopkinson, Agent, Governor General and
Commissioner of Assam, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, No. 368, dated
the 14th of September, 1866.
42. Ibid., 23–24.
43. Ibid.
44. Letter from the Honourable A. Eden, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the
Commissioner of Assam, No. 2893T., dated Darjeeling the 8 October 1866, 23–24.
45. Bonner, The Labour System of Assam. Bonner stated that the sources of information
regarding these cases of coolie abuse were mostly English newspapers like the Manchester
Guardian and the Morning Leader in England, and some of the ‘native newspapers’ from
Assam. See, Ibid., 14–15.
46. Ibid., 15.
47. Many a time, the workers were even forcefully debarred from registering a grievance. One of
the earliest cases of excessive physical violence exercised by a tea planter on some coolies was in
the year 1866. The case was of fierce flogging of a few labourers by Richard Dunn, the
Assistant Manager of Seerajuli tea garden of the Assam Company in Tezpur, in Darrang
district. The action caused the death of a boy named Jhowree. The deceased, along with his
father Seeboroth and some other labourers from the same garden, had run away from the
garden because they were not getting enough food to eat. They were caught and brought back
to the garden. Consequently, they were tied up on the orders of Richard Dunn. Richard Dunn
then reportedly beat all of them up with a cane, allegedly on orders from the manager of the
garden. The young boy Jhowree was subjected to a second round of beatings because he was
unable to work as a result of the earlier beating. Jhowree died the next day due to the excessive
physical torture. Dunn was accused of flogging other labourers too, including a woman named
Beebeejan. The labourers wanted to go to the police station and lodge a complaint against the
manager and the Assistant Manager Dunn. However, they were not allowed to leave the
plantation site. Annual Report on the administration of the Bengal Presidency, 1866–67, 119–20.
48. Sir Henry Cotton, the Chief Commissioner of Assam from 1896 to 1902, had been a vocal critic
of the abuses and exploitation prevalent in the tea plantations in Assam. The labour immigration
reports, produced under his authority, contained regular news and reports of excessive exploita-
tion and violence in the tea plantations in Assam. Sir Henry Cotton believed that ‘unless the
fullest publicity is given to the defects of an abnormal labour system, it is hopeless to look for
a remedy'. His observations on the plantation abuse are worth quoting here:
It is needless to say that it was only a small percentage of abuses which could come to
my knowledge. But I had cases brought to my notice where contracts of sickly and unfit
labourers were cancelled for the purpose of keeping down the rate of mortality among
contract labourers, and of others where deaths had been treated as desertions for the
same reason. I knew of cases where it was the practice to expel sickly Coolies who had
become unfit for labour. I have seen with my own eyes a Government hospital full of
sickly and dying Coolies whose contracts had been cancelled and who had just been
expelled from his garden by one of the oldest and most respected tea planters in the
province.
See Cotton, Indian and Home Memories, 265.
49. The extreme physical violence perpetrated on the bodies of the workers are often remem-
bered in the folk songs of the ‘tea tribes’ in Assam. The symbolism of violence and terror that
the Sahibs and their agents used to perpetrate is remembered as a cultural memory. The
geographies of the plantations are the essential backdrops in such folklore which bear
testimony of the violence that the coolies in the plantations regularly faced. We can consider
the following stanza from a Zhumoor song (the folk songs of the ‘tea tribes’ in Assam):
“Sardar demands only work and work; Babu asks to catch us in; Sahib threatens to flog;
560 J. BHARADWAJ

O cruel Shyam, we were cheated and brought to Assam.” Here, Sardar refers to the
recruiting agents and leaders of groups of labourers often employed in the tea plantations,
Babu refers to the supervisory and clerical officials employed in the tea plantations, the Sahib
refers to the planters/managers, and Shyam refers to the deity Krishna. See Tanti, “Asomor
Scah Jonogosthir Zhumoor Geet,” 98–118. (Translation mine).
50. The archive is replete with numerous cases of planter violence. The labour emigration
reports and the native press repeatedly reported regular instances of planter violence on the
coolies.
51. The colonial government, more or less maintained a watchful and tolerant attitude towards
the frequency of criminal complaints and the outcome of criminal trials involving planter
violence. Rana P. Behal has demonstrated that the colonial state accepted the fact that
a certain amount of European violence was necessary to keep the plantations – and the
empire – going. The devolution of authority from magistrate to manager reflected the state’s
willingness to promote the tea industry by allowing it to police itself. Criminal behavior,
including physical violence, confinement, and abduction, which would have ordinarily been
punishable by the state, was effectively decriminalised and legitimised by the penal contract.
See Behal, One Hundred Years of Servitude, 141–86.
52. Apart from Kolsky’s decisive study emphasising the violence inherent in the colonial rule
over the Indian subcontinent, Jordanna Balkin locates abject violence and physical abuse of
the destitute sections of the subject population that characterised the colonial rule in India.
Balkin’s study demonstrates regular occurrence of deadly violence by Europeans, the official
treatment of violence by Europeans and the seemingly racist nature of the British Rule of
Law. See Bailkin, “The Boot and the Spleen,” 462–93.
53. Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, 6.
54. Mukhopadhyay, Behind the Mask, 3.
55. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 14–34.
56. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 46–76.

Acknowledgement
The current paper forms a small part of my doctoral dissertation, to be submitted to the
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar,
Gujarat, India. I am grateful to Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar for providing me with
the research facilities and a doctoral fellowship to carry out my research. I am thankful to my
doctoral supervisor, Dr. Madhumita Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Humanities and Social
Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, for her comments, feedback and many
long conversations we have had regarding the current paper. I thank Mr. Praveen Kumar Singh, L.
L. M. Student, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, for his observations on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Jahnu Bharadwaj is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. His doctoral research looks at legal
history of the British rule in Assam, particularly focusing on the administration of criminal justice.
He holds an M. A. and an M. Phil in History from the Department of History, University of
Hyderabad, Telangana State, India. His areas of research interest include legal history of colonial
India, legal and administrative developments in colonial Assam, criminal legal policies, discourses
 ASIAN ETHNICITY 561

and institutions in colonial Assam, intellectual and cultural discourses in colonial Assam, and
modern Assamese Literature.

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