Abstract
The strength of Everyday Sustainability is Debarati Sen’s intricate portrait of the gendered lives entangled in the production of tea outside Darjeeling’s plantation system. The decline of established markets for Darjeeling tea in the 1980s, the political instability of the Gorkhaland movements, high-profile chemical scares, and the rise of demand for Fair Trade, sustainable, and organic tea in global markets challenged Darjeeling’s plantation system, creating new opportunities on the one hand and a biopolitical regime on the other. Many of these opportunities are created in what Sen refers to as ‘informal’ or ‘illegal’ tea production, which involve double the number of workers than the plantations (p. 9).
Sen explores the ways Fair Trade certification has affected lives within the plantations too, as new forms of discipline, intervention, and obligatory performance for visiting inspectors and enthusiasts. Free Trade brings new parameters, while also being shaped by existing systems of labour, family, patriarchy and party politics. Everyday Sustainability is interested in women’s agency within these new parameters, and is careful to be neither overly pessimistic about the failed promises of Fair Trade nor overly celebratory of women’s resilience and adaptation to these multi-directional pressures (chapter 7).
Of the substantive chapters that draw heavily on fieldwork, chapter 3 focuses on the changes to the tea industry in Darjeeling from the perspective of the workers, labour organisations, bureaucrats and plantations. Striking is the rise of Fair Trade NGOs within plantations and the expectations they create for the women, families and communities entangled in tea. NGOs have also changed—in part—the ways the local state and labour unions respectively govern tea in relationships of confrontation and cooperation. Detailing this conjuncture opens the book to closer inspection of the approach of NGOs and other ‘Fair Trade enthusiasts’ to the plantations and their notions of transnational solidarity (chapter 4); the persistent centrality of ghumauri—revolving credit groups used by women workers and to the disruptions to community organising brought by the Gorkhaland movements (chapter 5); the household relationships reconfigured by masculine crisis in Darjeeling marked by mass unemployment and the very visible place of women in the revitalised tea industry (chapter 7); and the ways in which Fair Trade opened up new spaces for political action for women, especially outside the plantation (chapter 8).
Chapter 6 is the highlight of the book. Beginning with the ways women interpret the manner in which they are represented in global circulations of tea industry images, Sen engages women in conversation about Fair Trade, and in particular the concept of swachcha vyapar, ‘a distinct Nepali iteration of Fair Trade that incorporates awareness of gender hierarchies…’ (p. 128). Through a series of episodes, including a visit from a male Fair Trade inspector from Delhi, the gendered politics of Fair Trade certification emerge. Most powerful are the distinctions women draw between the ways their bodies and labour are represented in Fair Trade and the tactics and actions they undertake in their daily lives to cultivate tea outside the plantations. Fair Trade also provides opportunities for empowerment, for collective agency to ‘emerge within market-based production systems’ (p. 151) but not in ways intended by its proponents. Sen adds ‘women in the cooperative did not perceive market-based trade a problem; it was the gendered barriers within their community, unintentionally strengthened by Fair Trade initiatives that they regarded as the major impediment to their options for earning cash and supplementing their family income…’ (p. 151). In capturing the intricacies of perceptions and agency, the chapter also captures the intricacies of Fair Trade itself, breaking down the idea of it as a monolithic movement originating far away, and identifying the ways it has become embedded in local structures and practices.
When focused on the political context of Darjeeling and the people engaged in ‘everyday sustainability’ the book is rich and memorable. However, the setup is long and the early chapters feel obligatory rather than necessary. Sen’s analysis of the global dynamics driving Fair Trade in the Introduction are vague and too much agency is given to imprecise forces: neoliberalism, the World Bank, the United Nations (which we are told formulates ‘rules and regulations’ on human rights and gender justice), and agglomerations of NGOs. In a similar vein, Fair Trade and its attendant (and demonstrably misplaced) politics are attributed to things happening in ‘the West’. There is a missed opportunity here to analyse the ways these ideas circulate along with the images of women tea workers so skilfully deconstructed in the book. Indeed it is not uncommon to see such images in Malaysia, Japan or Singapore and, of course, in India too, not just in Darjeeling but in metropolitan cities where sites for upscale tea and coffee consumption are proliferating rapidly. The gaze that seeks out the ‘colorful happy faces of Nepali tea pluckers’ (p.45) (not to mention the gaze that sees Nepali women in ‘sexualised, classist, [and] gendered tropes’, p. 44) is domestic as well as global, and domestic tourists make up the largest proportion of tourists to Darjeeling, and thus constitute a major audience for these images.
Chapter 3 gives a detailed account of Nepalis in the Indian context. Clearly Nepalis ‘are victims of stereotyping and economic disparities’ (p. 56), yet it is unclear how stereotypes function in Darjeeling district where Nepalis are in the majority. Do these stereotypes dissolve in everyday life or are they internalised—especially given the drive for statehood and Sixth Schedule status discussed in Middleton’s (2015) work? The discussion of the literature on tea and gender in India is thorough, though deeper engagement with Sarah Besky’s (2013) work on similar themes is needed. It was surprising to see little reference to ethnographic work on tea, place, ethnicity and gender from other contexts, most notably Jinghong Zhang’s Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic (2014). These works offer a different setup: one that looks for emerging dynamics throughout the Global South generated from domestic and global demand and mimicry rather than a singular attribution to developments in ‘the West’ arriving unaltered to Darjeeling.