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Abstract
Hunting encompasses a range of sensory experiences such as sight, smell and taste (game as food). On the tea frontier of British Assam, such a sensory world of hunting was closely connected to the ideas and practices of empire, as well as to the production of the global commodity of tea. In this regard, A.R. Ramsden’s memoir, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in Assam (1945), provides a rich illustration of sensory experiences in the making of such a tea frontier and a global commodity. Furthermore, the memoir is constituted through the complex interplay of senses that is mapped onto the plantation social order. In the process, the sensory experiences of the ‘sahib’ and the ‘native’ are organised in an imperial narrative of tea and frontier-making. Yet, given its historical moment, the context of imperial crisis is also reflected in the memoir through the contradictions of sensory experiences and, thereby, the problems faced in producing the imperial narrative of tea and frontier-making.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Höne for their valuable suggestions on the draft of the article, and the anonymous South Asia reviewer of the article for the suggestions and comments. I would also like to thank Lipokmar Dzuvichu for his insightful comments on the draft of the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For a tea history of the area, see Sir Harry Townend (comp.), A History of Shaw Wallace & Co. and Shaw Wallace & Co. Ltd. (Calcutta: Shaw Wallace & Co. Ltd, 1965), pp. 25–35.
2. Sadiya and Doom Dooma are in the present-day Tinsukia district of Assam (part of British Lakhimpur district). Notably, in the shadows of the Himalayas and the Patkai ranges, the foothills and the narrow plains between the Lohit and the Burhi Dihing rivers of Lakhimpur district comprised the industrial heartland of the British North-east India frontier. Themselves big rivers, the Lohit and the Burhi Dihing were two of the numerous tributaries of the Brahmaputra river. The area was densely packed with tea plantations, petroleum and coal fields, and roads and railways, besides the small urban spaces that were developed around these resources. There were also local villages, the pre-colonial settlements and dense rainforests. During World War II, as part of the Allied war front, the airfields of Chabua and Dinjan in the area were key air bases for United States Army Air Force operations against the Japanese in China and Burma.
3. For example, see ‘Report on Tea Culture in Assam for the Year 1936’ (1936), Assam State Archives, Guwahati (henceforth, ASA), Lib/R043/S4/40.
4. The ‘Inner Line’ was a regulation (under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873) that the British Indian government implemented to try to control the relationships of its subjects with the ‘frontier tribes’ living on the borders of its jurisdiction by prescribing a ‘line’ in each of the concerned districts of British north-east India. For a general colonial account of the ‘Inner Line Regulation’, see Alexander Mackenzie, The North-East Frontier of India (Delhi: Mittal, repr., 1979), pp. 55–6, 89–90; and Robert Reid, History of the Frontier Areas Bordering on Assam, from 1883–1941 (Delhi: Eastern Publishing House, repr., 1983).
5. A.R. Ramsden, Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in Assam (Guwahati: Spectrum, repr., 2016), pp. 64–76, 89. When Ramsden joined the Assam Frontier Tea Company, it was experiencing a period of expansion: see ‘Assam Frontier Tea Company, 1943–46’, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library (henceforth, IOR), MSS EUR D 1056/16.
6. For a general mapping of the social composition of the area during the period, see ‘Report on the Resettlement of the Lakhimpur District 1929–1935’ (1937), ASA, Lib/R065/S5/04.
7. On the question of Nepalese labour employed in the Assam tea plantations, also see ‘Employment of Nepalese in the Tea Gardens’ (1926), General, ASA, XXVI/6/26.
8. On the relations between Ramsden’s plantations and the Marwaris, see Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 142–6. On plantation workers’ protests and the Marwaris generally in the area, see ‘Assam Disorders: Tea Estate Scenes: English Managers Assaulted’, The Times of India (4 Oct. 1920) [https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.jnu.ac.in/hnptimesofindia/docview/311049867/5DB73AE6EACC417FPQ/3?accountid=142596, accessed 25 Feb. 2020].
9. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 26–32.
10. For a general discussion of imperial hunters and local society, see Angela Thompsell, Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
11. On the adventure of hunting, the maharaja of Cooch Behar interestingly mentioned in his memoir that the use of machans made hunting ‘dull work’: see Maharaja of Cooch Behar, Thirty-Seven Years of Big Game Shooting in Cooch Behar, Duars and Assam: A Rough Diary by the Maharaja of Cooch Behar (Bombay: Times Press, 1908), p. xxvii.
12. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 32–3.
13. See George M. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1884), pp. 88–90; and Colonel Pollok and W.S. Thom, Wild Sports of Burma and Assam (London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1900), pp. 425–507. Also see Shafqat Hussain, ‘Forms of Predation: Tiger and Makhor Hunting in Colonial Governance’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 46, no. 5 (Sept. 2012), pp. 1212–38; on hunting and frontier, see Shafqat Hussain, ‘Sports-Hunting, Fairness and Colonial Identity: Collaboration and Subversion in the Northwestern Frontier Region of the British Indian Empire’, in Conservation and Society, Vol. 8, no. 2 (2010), pp. 112–26.
14. ‘Guns and Gun Licenses, 1935’, General, ASA, XIII–3/35.
15. For a detailed study on some of these processes with regard to Assam, see Arupjyoti Saikia, Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826–2000 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011).
16. ‘Report on the Resettlement of the Lakhimpur District 1929–1935’ (1937), ASA, Lib/R065/S5/04; also see K.E.L. Pennel, A Short Account of the Recent Developments in Road Communications in the Province of Assam, India (Shillong: Government Press, 1939); and T. Kinney, Old Times in Assam (Calcutta: ‘Star’ Press, 1896). For a general business history account in this regard, see H.A. Antrobus, A History of the Assam Company 1839–1953 (Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable Ltd, 1957).
17. For example, on the importance and critique of the visual, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).
18. On the complex role of the visual and the documenting of frontier, see Erik Mueggler, The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011).
19. Andrew J. Rotter, Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 86–130.
20. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 12–3. The Great Earthquake occurred on 12 June 1897. For an account of it by the then chief commissioner of Assam, see Henry Cotton, Indian and Home Memories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911), pp. 228–41.
21. On the transport network (roads, railways, river steamers and tramways) as central to the imperial penetration and reproduction of Assam as a resource frontier but represented as being for the sake of Assam’s modernisation, see Cotton, Indian and Home Memories, p. 245.
22. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 13.
23. For a study on how such dualities of nature–culture unfolded through the politics of relations between imperial agents and local society at different historical junctures in the Naga Hills of British Assam, see Jelle J.P. Wouters, ‘Reconfiguring Colonial Ethnography’, in T.B. Subba (ed.), North-East India: A Handbook of Anthropology (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2012), pp. 99–121.
24. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 97.
25. Ibid., p. 27.
26. On plantation clock time, see Rana P. Behal, One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam (New Delhi: Tulika, 2014). On early literary representations of such factory clock time, and how it differed from everyday rural life, see Rajanikanta Bordoloi’s Assamese-language novel Miri Jiori (Daughter of the Miris) (Guwahati: Createspace Independent Publishing, [1895] rpr. 2018).
27. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 28.
28. On the poor living, health and mortality conditions of the tea plantation workers in Assam, see J. Buckingham, Tea-Garden Coolies in Assam, A Letter (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1894); The Indian Labour Year Book 1947–1948 (Delhi: Government of India, 1949) p. 171; and Behal, One Hundred Years of Servitude.
29. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 28–9.
30. Ibid., pp. 133–5.
31. On the transforming agrarian conditions during Ramsden’s time, see ‘Report on the Resettlement of the Lakhimpur District 1929–1935’ (1937), ASA, Lib/R065/S5/04.
32. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 147–9.
33. Ibid.
34. It is notable that tiger and leopard hunting was connected to the display of power even among the Baptist missionaries who went to British Assam. For example, see P.E. Moore, ‘A Missionary’s Leopard Story, Nowgong, Assam’, in The Baptist Missionary Magazine, Vol. LXXXI (1901), pp. 547–8. On representing the hunting of tigers and bears in the Lushai Hills of British Assam, see P. Thirumal and C. Lalrozami, ‘On the Discursive and Material Context of the First Handwritten Lushai Newspaper: “Mizo Chanchin Laishui”, 1898’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 47, no. 3 (2010), pp. 377–403.
35. On the significance of the tiger hunt in imperial India, see Joseph Sramek, ‘“Face Him Like a Briton”: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800–1875’, in Victorian Studies, Vol. 48, no. 4 (Summer 2006), pp. 659–80. Also see John M. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). On tiger hunting, colonialism and ecology, see Dane Huckelbridge, No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History (New York: William Morrow, 2019).
36. Colonial law forbade the use of firearms by those without a licence (that is, in this case, it was unlawful for Mathaloo to use Ramsden’s rifle). Even the transfer of licences had to be reported. There were instances when disputes arising from the transfer of licences could lead to the cancellation of a licence: see ‘An Appeal Petition by One Lalit Chandra Gohain’, Guns and Gun Licenses, 1935, General, ASA, XIII–3/35. However, planters throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries recounted in their memoirs how their firearms were used or borrowed by villagers or servants for hunting: see, for example, Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, p. 88; and Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 68.
37. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 89–90.
38. Ibid. If Ramsden was exploring for and investing in minerals, this was not against the policy of the Company: see ‘3 (C), Memorandum of Association (1925)’, Assam Frontier Tea Company, 1943–46, IOR, MSS EUR D 1056/16.
39. See A.W. Porter, ‘Report on the Expedition to the Hukawng Valley and Naga Hills (Burma), Season–December 1929 to May 1930’ (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, Burma, 1930), p. 5; and R.T. O’Connor Mitchell, ‘Report on a Tour in the Naga Hills District (Burma), Season–December 1939 to April 1940’ (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, Burma, 1940), p. 5. Also see ‘Royal Commission on the Opium Traffic: Special Report of the Evidence Taken in India, Part II 20th November 1893’ (London: Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, 1893). For historical studies on opium and Assam, see Amalendu Guha, Medieval and Early Colonial Assam: Society, Polity and Economy (Guwahati: Anwesha, 2015), pp. 340–60; and Ashley Wright, Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
40. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 99.
41. Ibid.
42. For a general report on opium in Assam, including its smuggling, see ‘Report of the Assam Opium Enquiry Committee, 1933’ (Shillong: Government Press, 1933). For an account of how people and goods could move between the frontiers of China, Burma and Assam, see E.C. Young, ‘A Journey from Yun-Nan to Assam’, in The Geographical Journal, Vol. 30, no. 2 (Aug. 1907), pp. 152–80.
43. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 101.
44. Ibid., pp. 98–9.
45. ‘Police Cases in Tea Gardens, 1930’, General, ASA, X-3 of 1930.
46. For example, see Ronald H. Cronin, ‘Recollections of a Varied Life (Memoir)’ (1980), IOR, MSS Photo Eur 225; H.E. Shortt, ‘In the Days of the Raj, and After, Doctor, Soldier, Scientist, Shikari’ (1987), IOR, MSS Eur C435, pp. 64–82; Maxwell Lefroy, ‘Burma Oil Fields under Siege, 1949–50’ (1950), BP Archive, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, MS-1950. Though representing the medical field (nursing) during World War II, for a perspective on Upper Assam during the period, see Mary Robertson, ‘14th Army Nurse’, Imperial War Memorial Archives, London, 83/27/1.
47. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 7.
48. On empire as an opportunity for imperial agents, see Townend (comp.), A History of Shaw Wallace & Co. and Shaw Wallace & Co. Ltd.
49. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 157.
50. Ibid., p. 159.
51. Ibid., p. 156.
52. Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), in Michael W. Jennings et al. (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 731–6.
53. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 133–5.
54. Interestingly, memoirs of the period by Assamese participating in empire and capital did not describe their hunting experiences in terms of taming nature, industrially or culturally. Focusing equally on their failures as hunters, they wondered whether by practising the imperial form of hunting, they were becoming disconnected from their historical culture of human–nature relations. However, the reality of such disruptions was seen as an aspect of their modernity: see, for example, Lakhminath Bezbaroa (1868–1938), ‘Appendix’, in Mur Jiwan Xuaran (Reminiscences of My Life), Part II (Guwahati: Banalata, repr., 1992), p. 69. On colonial modernity in Assam, see Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2011).
55. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 115–8.
56. Ibid., p. 116.
57. On power and the senses, see Constance Classen et al., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 161–79.
58. Guha, Medieval and Early Colonial Assam, pp. 340–60.
59. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 119–20.
60. Ibid., p. 120.
61. Such an approach might be one of the advantages of a production-oriented explanation of sensory experiences pertaining to regimes of global commodities rather than consumption-oriented explanations, such as in David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 204–34.
62. One of the exceptions was Mary Robertson’s memoir. As a nurse posted at Panitola (near Dibrugarh, Assam) during World War II, her control over the human body, its wounds and its fluids through the practice of medicine and hygiene appears to have freed her from the fear of the deadly tropics and the ‘natives’: see Robertson, ‘14th Army Nurse’.
63. Ramsden, Assam Planter, pp. 18–22.
64. Ibid., p. 137–8.
65. Ibid., p. 138.
66. The Indian Labour Year Book, 1947–48, p. 118; on labour unrest in Assam during the period, see Amalendu Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle & Electoral Politics in Assam (New Delhi: Tulika Books, rev. ed., 2006), pp. 152–3, 192–9. For a government representation of labour unrest, see ‘Exodus of 187 Coolies of the Ananda Tea Estate in the Lakhimpur District (1931)’, General & Judicial, Immigration, ASA, Nos-1-48/31 (Immi-A-1-48/31); and ‘Alleged Murder of Assam Tea Planter’, The Times of India (28 Nov. 1931) [https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.jnu.ac.in/hnptimesofindia/docview/324650323/EF3407B57CD34373PQ/1?accountid=142596, accessed 25 Feb. 2020].
67. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 139.
68. See, for example, Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam; and Kinney, Old Times in Assam.
69. Government reports blamed labourers and their poor moral character for their abject living conditions: see ‘Royal Commission on Labour in India, Written Evidence, Vol. VI, Part I: Assam and the Dooars’ (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1930), p. 3. However, The Indian Labour Year Book, 1947–1948, argued the complete opposite, stating that most workers in Assam were ‘suffering from under-nourishment, general weakness and lack of vitality’: see The Indian Labour Year Book, 1947–1948, p. 171.
70. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, the Lakhimpur district of British Assam witnessed a series of periods of unrest among the peasants, labour and the local middle class. In this regard, see ‘Visit of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to Assam in December 1937’ (1937), Home Confidential, ASA, 171 C/1937.
71. Ramsden, Assam Planter, p. 147.
72. For an interesting example of the British ‘sahib’ as the contradiction in a Naga folktale of the time, see J.H. Hutton, ‘The Traveling Companion and the Grateful Doe’, in The Angami Nagas (London: Macmillan & Co., 1921), pp. 271–2.