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

“The author’s prodigious work illuminates and deals with the vast consequences of creating the Empire’s Tea Garden and the settlement of over a million migrants into the tea plantations…. Read this deeply researched and wide-ranging book.”—Richard Ellis, Royal Society for Asian Affairs

“[P]athbreaking…. [T]his careful and thoughtful study is especially welcome…. Empire’s Garden provides a rich set of reflections on regions, regionalism, and the growth of nationalism in the modern world.”—Thomas R. Metcalf, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“Empire’s Garden creates a rich, rewarding, and multi-stranded appreciation of Assam’s modern history. It greatly enriches understanding of the history and politics of Assam while at the same time giving fresh insights into the processes involved in the making of modern India and the incorporation of its diverse regions.”—David Arnold, The Economic History Review

“This book is an important work exploring the history of Assam through the
colonial era.”—Gareth Price, Pacific Affairs

“Jayeeta Sharma’s recent monograph brilliantly explores how the contradiction inherent in the integration of Assam with global capitalist modernity through the quasi-feudal agency of colonial capitalism transformed social and economic life in Bramhaputra Valley, one of the core regions of colonial Assam’s territories.” —Subho Basu, Labour/Le Travail

“The study is a significant contribution to the historiography of Assam for using a multitude of sources in the Assamese language.” —Gunnel Cederlof, American Historical Review

“The author’s prodigious work illuminates and deals with the vast consequences of creating the Empire’s Tea Garden and the settlement of over a million migrants into the tea plantations…. Read this deeply researched and wide-ranging book.”—Richard Ellis, Royal Society for Asian Affairs

“[P]athbreaking…. [T]his careful and thoughtful study is especially welcome…. Empire’s Garden provides a rich set of reflections on regions, regionalism, and the growth of nationalism in the modern world.”—Thomas R. Metcalf, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“Empire’s Garden creates a rich, rewarding, and multi-stranded appreciation of Assam’s modern history. It greatly enriches understanding of the history and politics of Assam while at the same time giving fresh insights into the processes involved in the making of modern India and the incorporation of its diverse regions.”—David Arnold, The Economic History Review

“This book is an important work exploring the history of Assam through the
colonial era.”—Gareth Price, Pacific Affairs

“Jayeeta Sharma’s recent monograph brilliantly explores how the contradiction inherent in the integration of Assam with global capitalist modernity through the quasi-feudal agency of colonial capitalism transformed social and economic life in Bramhaputra Valley, one of the core regions of colonial Assam’s territories.” —Subho Basu, Labour/Le Travail

“The study is a significant contribution to the historiography of Assam for using a multitude of sources in the Assamese language.” —Gunnel Cederlof, American Historical Review

“Empire’s Garden is a new departure for the historical study of Assam, extraordinarily wide-ranging, with important things to say not only about Assam but about India, South Asia, and themes ranging from colonialism, nationalism, and regionalism to ethnicity, elite formation, migration, and economic development. It will anchor histories of Assam for years to come.”—David Ludden, editor of Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia

“This rich history of Assam fills a void in scholarship. Assam is an area of South Asia that has received little attention from serious historians of the subcontinent, except those working on the tea industry. Jayeeta Sharma provides us with fascinating details of Assam’s history. More importantly, she relates local themes to larger issues of South Asian history: colonial ideologies of race and the importance of these ideologies to the political economy, the structure of colonial rule, the development of the public sphere, and the reformulation of identities under colonial circumstances. Empire’s Garden also helps us to understand the historical dimensions of contemporary conflicts in the region, without making the conflicts seem predetermined by what happened in the colonial period.”—Douglas E. Haynes, author of Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928

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