In The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India Sarah Besky presents an ethnography of the Darjeeling tea trade, unraveling a “Third World agrarian imaginary” that masks the continuing injustice and marginalization of workers on tea plantations. Her ethnography is rooted in the importance of the history of place, presenting a plantation setting that bears the scars of British imperialism while functioning as a modern, exploitative bisnis. From this foundation, she establishes the definition of a “tripartite moral economy,” an interdependency between plantation owners, workers, and the non-human agro-environment. This moral economy, a vision of justice from the workers’ perspective, is ignored by outsider attempts to bring justice to the tea trade.
As a result the market remains deaf to laborers, economic actors who must have a visible role in the process of exchange in order for the market to be considered “just.” Besky structures her argument through an analysis of the affects of fair trade certification, Geographic Indication, and the Gorkhaland separatist movement, ultimately critiquing each process’s disregard for the considerations of the plantation workers themselves. Her analysis is underscored by the importance of Darjeeling as a place providing the social, environmental, and cultural context of the tea trade, Bourdieu’s definition of distinction and class tastes, and Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. Each of these broader concepts converge to strengthen Besky’s argument of the limitations of fair trade, Geographic Indication, and the Gorkhaland separatist movement in overturning a history of the marginalization of tea plantation workers in Darjeeling.
Sarah Besky’s research breaks down the three main systems that claim to bring justice to marginalized tea plantation workers. Published in 2013 after an extensive ethnographic study of the people and place of Darjeeling between 2006 and 2012, her book is structured into five chapters that each outline the specific roots of her argument. She begins by framing her analysis within the history of Darjeeling as a place under British rule and the subsequent formation of tea plantations. After the English victory in the Anglo-Nepal Wars, British imperial and East India Company control was solidified in the Darjeeling region. After experimentation in imperial botanical gardens, the local climate was deemed ideal for tea production and the creation of plantations accelerated exponentially.
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Determined by British rule, the workers on these colonial plantations were Nepalese, those on the losing side of the Anglo-Nepal Wars. After Indian independence in 1947, the future of the tea plantation slowly evolved to be able to remain viable in the globalized marketplace. Current plantation workers describe this evolution as taking a sharp turn in the 1990s from an industri plantation, one more considerate of the workers and the environment, to a bisnis plantation, one focused on extraction and exploitation of labor and the environment. Now operating in this bisnis plantation context, workers’ vision of justice is defined by Besky as the “tripartite moral economy,” a reciprocal system composed of the planters, the workers, and the environment. The final three chapters argue that modern day attempts to bring justice to the tea trade disregard this idea of the moral economy and the workers themselves.
First discussed is Darjeeling’s Geographical Indication (GI) status. Through interviews with tea planters, associations, and the Tea Board of India, Besky illustrates how Darjeeling has become recognizable on the international stage as tied to its terroir—a “taste of a place.” Second is an analysis of the process of fair trade certification, which Besky specifically centers on the Windsor Tea Estate. Although fair trade premiums allow the plantation owner, Mr. Keshave Roy, to invest money in housing and schools, the reality of the situation is that these duties had already been encoded in the 1951 Plantation Labor Act. This means that the profits from fair trade do not directly benefit the workers’s income but rather are used to cover different expenses that should have already been under the duty of the plantation owner according to law.
Lastly discussed is the life of Madan Tamang as a leader in the Gorkha independence movement. The thread throughout this final chapter is that, despite their identity crisis and strong ties to the land, separatists have never challenged the tea business that proved the foundation of the perpetuation of colonialism and outsider rule in Darjeeling. In her conclusion, Besky argues that each of these three systems fail in their attempt to bring justice to the tea workers as they all neglect a discussion of the workers themselves and consciously avoid the colonial history that remains a factor on tea plantations today.
Besky prefaces her discussion of outside system efforts for justice by outlining the workers’ ideal vision of justice through the creation of a tripartite moral economy. This moral economy is defined by the reciprocal relationships between planters, laborers, and the non-human environment. In a cyclical fashion, planters would take care of their workers and the workers in turn would take care of the land and cultivation of tea, which would then lead to profits for the planters, and an endless cycle would take place. Through this interpretation, Besky argues that laborers tie a true social value to the tea commodity that they produce. For the workers, Darjeeling tea is the product of a nuanced relationship among fluctuating parts. In this way, the commodity contains value beyond its mere monetary, quantitative value.
For the Nepalese laborer, tea is ascribed a unique social value derived from the relationship between themselves, the planters, and the surrounding environment. Therefore, the life cycle of the tea plant itself influences plantation life. This cultural and social value imbued in the tea plant echoes Viviana Zelizer’s concept of different monies allocated for different uses based off of perceived cultural or social values. Zelizer argues that this concept “applies…to anything that is socially exchangeable,” and for the Nepali workers that is the tea commodity. Tea has a unique social value in the eyes of those who cultivate it. From this framework of Darjeeling and the workers themselves is discussed different systems’ attempts to bring justice to the tea trade, each of which ignore this worker vision of a tripartite moral economy.
Besky’s first analysis centers on the concept of justice through Darjeeling’s Geographical Indication status. This GI status marks Darjeeling tea the “intellectual property” of the Indian government and serves as a way to distinguish this product from the rest of the tea market. Besky writes that a large part of the distinguishing factor of Darjeeling tea is its ties to the region, emphasizing the importance of terroir, or “taste of a place.” Besky defines this taste as “practices of consumption that are tied to class politics,” based off of Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of “distinction.” This formation of taste is derived in a large part from GI advertising that promotes a false image of tea cultivation as a craft rooted in Nepalese tradition and represented by the delicate touch of women fieldworkers dressed in traditional garb.
In this fictional portrayal of tea plantation laborers as gentle caretakers of slowly nurtured tea plants, the—particularly women—workers are having an image imposed upon them. As a result, the habitus of the Nepali tea worker presented to the world is a false fabrication. Unlike the freedom through manipulation of your own cultural capital and forged identity that Julie Bettie discusses defines “Las Chicas” in her analysis of class distinctions, these Nepalese women become the products of, not the makers of, their habitus. Their habitus is created and defined for them by the vast system of GI and fair trade that manipulates their image for the benefit of the planters but not for the workers they falsely represent.
Besky’s second point of analysis critiques the idea of achieving justice through Fair Trade certification. Through the story of Mr. Keshave Roy she reveals the inherent contradiction in granting plantations “fair trade” certification. Similar to the GI status, fair trade certification obscures the reality of colonial history in the tea trade. The “fairness” of fair trade is based off of an image of an entrepreneur using the extra profits to better his quality of life. The reality is that fair trade plantations operate in a way that does not give such agency to laborers. Instead, the tea plantation system of today remains a hierarchal structure based on workers’ dependence on owners for much of their livelihoods, including food, health care, housing, and education.
Similar to Shamus Khan’s discussion of the false perception of mobility within society’s hierarchy in and outside the private school sphere, fair trade certification operates on the false pretense that there is mobility within the plantation hierarchy. The reality is that the hierarchy is cemented into place. This reality remains masked behind fair trade’s positive, helping image. The false impact of fair trade seems legitimate from the consumer perspective. Darjeeling’s fair trade demarcation is what makes consumption of the tea socially palatable—it obscures the realities of colonial history and presents the cultivation in “gardens” rather than “plantations.” In this way, buying fair trade also relates to upper class taste distinction and the habitus of Darjeeling consumers.
Besky’s final point is an analysis of justice through sovereignty in the Gorkhaland separatist movement. First arising in the 1980s, Gorkha independence efforts are largely supported by tea plantation workers. Leaders of the Gorkhaland movement address the current identity crisis plaguing the Gorkhas in a region tied to the history of their ethnic group but under control of the Indian government. Gorkhaland activists call for separation and autonomy to actualize their identity. This vision of justice through an autonomous future is derived from a curated image of the Ghorkas’s historic belonging to the land of Darjeeling. While the Gorkhaland movement urges independence, it does not address what the future of tea plantations would be in the new state. Though the Gorkhaland politicians call for political autonomy, they remain silent on the reality of the tea worker’s lack of autonomy within the plantation system. Ultimately, the Gorkhaland movement fails to help the individual tea plantation worker because it does not realistically plan a future deconstruction of the perpetuated colonialist structure of the bisnis plantation operations.
Besky’s criticism of Geographic Indication, fair trade, and Gorkhaland sovereignty in the context of the Darjeeling tea trade is rooted in each system’s disregard for the plantation worker.
Each of the systems present themselves as working for justice within the tea trade but each fundamentally ignore the very actors in the system that make tea cultivation possible. Besky’s analysis of the erasure of the plantation laborer’s role in the production of the tea commodity is related to Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. According to Marx, the process of fetishization results when a commodity’s use value, the work necessary to bring this product into society, is superseded by its exchange value, how the commodity compares to others in the market. Throughout this process, a “fetish” or “power” is attributed to the object and humans forget that they were the ones who endowed the product with such power in the first place. The emphasis on exchange value is where this mystical quality comes from. In the context of the Darjeeling tea trade, the cultivated tea undergoes this process of commodity fetishization, resulting in an obscuring of the labor process that goes into its production.
Overall, Sarah Besky presents a cohesive argument on the failures of GI status, fair trade, and the Gorkhaland movement in bringing justice to the individual tea worker. Her analysis is rooted in the historical, social, and environmental context of Darjeeling. A site of “imperial ruins,” modern day Darjeeling is a reflection of the history of British colonial presence and the “botanical contact zone” created by the British import of tea bushes and other plants. The three systems operate within a “Third World agrarian imaginary” that is blind to engrained injustice in the labor system and lacks a critical analysis of the plantation system itself.
Rather than address the colonial legacy or considerations of the plantation workers themselves, these three approaches operate within the established plantation system and ultimately perpetuate the injustices it produces. In this way, each approach ignores the vision for a tripartite moral economy considered necessary for justice in the eyes of the plantation workers. Besky frames her criticism of each system with connections to theoretical bases in economic anthropology, including: the social and cultural value attributed to commodities, Bourdieu’s definition of distinction and class taste, and Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. Supported by these arguments, Besky formulates a sound thesis on the failure of Geographic Indication, fair trade, and the separatist movement to bring justice to the tea trade, revealing each process’ blindness to the concerns of the individual tea plantation worker.
Works Cited
- Besky, Sarah. 2013. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
