Empire's Garden

Sharma, Jayeeta:
Empire’s Garden : Assam and the Making of India / Jayeeta Sharma. - Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2011. - ca. 344 S. : Ill., Kt. - (Radical Perspectives)
ISBN 978-0-8223-5032-3 (cloth)
US$ 94,95
ISBN 978-0-8223-5049-1 (paperback)
US$ 25,95
DDC: 954.16203
-- Angekündigt für Juli 2011 --

Beschreibung
In the mid-nineteenth century, the British created a region of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled the imperial coffers and offered the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from Central India. In the twentieth century, these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process in which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non-Aryan” indigenous tribals or migrant laborers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
Preface. xi
Note on Orthography and Usage. xiv
Introduction. 1
PART I. MAKING A GARDEN. 23
   1. Nature's Jungle, Empire's Garden. 25
   2. Borderlands, Rice Eaters, and Tea Growers. 49
   3. Migrants in the Garden: Expanding the Frontier. 79
PART II. IMPROVING ASSAM, MAKING INDIA. 117
   4. Old Lords and "Improving" Regimes. 119
   5. Bringing Progress, Restoring Culture. 147
   6. Language and Literature: Framing Identity. 177
   7. Contesting Publics: Raced Communities and Gendered History. 205
Conclusion. 234
Notes. 243
Glossary. 273
Bibliography. 277
Index. 311

Autor
JAYEETA SHARMA is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Profile page.

Quellen: Duke University Press; WorldCat; Library of Congress; Amazon (Deutschland)