Abstract
The Darjeeling Distinction richly details life on Darjeeling plantations and shows how various calls for justice potentially silence workers’ voices and obscure structures of power and inequality. Besky’s impressive field work provides the reader with a unique glimpse into the lives of the women who work on the tea plantation, balanced with fascinating interviews with those on the other end of the hierarchy, including, tea planters, Tea Board of India officials, Fair Trade certifiers, Gorkhaland activists, and others. This richly detailed ethnography provides unique and important insights into the 21st century plantation economy.
The book begins with historical background, detailing the colonial history of Darjeeling and how tea was imported into the region along with Nepali labor. Besky then presents a window into everyday working life on the tea plantation, reporting how workers conceive of a dichotomy between industri-type plantations, where planters reinvest in the plantation and workers are provided with in-kind benefits including housing, schools, recreational space, and so on, and bisnis-type plantations, on which planters neglect their obligations to the plantation and to workers. Darjeeling tea’s designation as a Geographical Indication (GI) product and as Fair Trade is associated with workers’ perceptions of a historical shift from the industri-type plantation model to the bisnis-type model. Besky details how the marketing of Darjeeling tea as a GI product necessitates a certain narrative and performance that undermines the unequal conditions under which the tea is grown. She then shows how Fair Trade certification undermines the responsibility of planters, along with the responsibility of the Indian State and its officials, to provide decent livelihoods for plantation workers. Besky then details how the Gorkhaland movement (created in order to form an independent state within India for the Gorkha people who work on Darjeeling’s tea plantations) and its ahistorical discourse at times support tea workers’ struggles, but also often fails to resonate with tea workers’ notions of justice.
The book is of great potential interest to social scientists working on labor and labor movements, development, and the rural global south. It provides a unique insight into how GI status, Fair Trade certification, and Gorkhaland activists create narratives based on an ahistorical tea plantation worker identity, and employ notions of justice that are incommensurate with tea plantation workers’ own views of justice. Besky finds that tea plantation workers think of a binary between ‘just’ planters who provide a wide-range of institutions for their workers such as housing, recreational facilities, child care, medical care, and so on, and those planters, associated with pursuing a more contemporary plantation business model, who provide a wage and little more to their labor force. The three advocates for tea plantation labor that Besky details in the book – GI, Fair Trade, and Gorkhaland activists – fail to engage with tea plantation labor’s concepts of justice and thereby create programmes and policies that do little to ameliorate the status of tea plantation labor, and more often create worse working conditions.
Besky’s use of space and time in the book leads to a rich description of contemporary plantation life in Darjeeling. This sense of time, which informs her ethnographic methodology, helps to elucidate power and hierarchy that might otherwise be rendered as ‘traditional’, ‘native’ practice. Likewise, her analysis of multiple units of analysis – global, national, and regional – provides for a rich, nuanced understanding of how the plantation system reproduces itself over time, even in the face of politico-economic changes in these three registers. These particular considerations of multiple spaces over time allow Besky to levy what in my view is a particularly compelling and novel critique of Fair Trade. Fair Trade agencies, grounded in a particular epistemology, operate under the logic that higher prices paid by consumers in the United States will translate to better lives for ‘farmers’ (Fair Trade’s terminology for planters), and workers in the rural Global South. In fact, Besky shows how Darjeeling tea plantation workers’ in-kind benefits (which Indian labor law stipulates should be provided to tea plantation workers) have been significantly reduced, while wage increases have barely kept pace with inflation as a result of Fair Trade’s focus on raising worker’s wages.
After reading the book, I was left with a few questions about how these Fair Trade policies were created. Did Fair Trade certifiers consider the work structure of the plantation when designing policies? If so, did they try to address the unique social structure of work on the plantation? In other words, is this correlation between the introduction of Fair Trade and the decline of working conditions on Darjeeling Tea plantations a failure of policy to adequately account for a known problem? Is this a matter of policy makers’ ignorance of the particular working conditions and the effects of existing policy? Or is a known problem that is actively dismissed? On page 121, Besky writes that she could not get a clear response from Fair Trade officials regarding the rationale for certain unique features of Fair Trade policy in Darjeeling. It would have been interesting to know more about the specific interview questions asked by Besky and responses given by Fair Trade officials, and to know whether Besky looked to other potential sources for answers to these fascinating and important questions she raises in the book.
Besky’s take-away is that those who purport to work for the improvement of working conditions on Darjeeling plantations are not in dialogue with plantation workers about what they want and how they conceive of progress. While certainly the Tea Board of India, Gorkhaland activists, and other interested parties could gain valuable insights from the book, I would argue that the book is best suited to make a policy intervention in Fair Trade policy. Besky aptly identifies specific instances of failures of Fair Trade policy that could potentially, through rethinking the relationship to the plantation economy and global Fair Trade policy, be corrected.
This book is not simply of relevance to policy makers but also raises significant historical questions that could be of great interest to historical anthropologists. The way various groups and interests construct an ahistorical tribal identity in order to make claims on local, national, and global levels potentially dialogues well with concerns in historical anthropology. The historical and social construction of tribal identity has been well addressed by historical anthropologists working on India and elsewhere (Chandra, 2013; Guha, 1999; Thakur, 2014; Wilmsen, 1989). Future research on the Darjeeling tea workers could benefit from this meticulously researched, existing literature that details similar historical processes within India and across the globe. Likewise, historical anthropologists’ analyses of the socio-historical construction of tribal identity could benefit from consideration of this particularly multi-faceted and unique case of Darjeeling tea plantation workers and their families.