SOAS Anthropology Department Seminar - Jayaseelan Raj

The SOAS Anthropology Department welcomes Dr Jayaseelan Raj for his talk Counter-plantation imaginaries: Dalits and autonomy in India’s Tea Belt.

In September 2015, a massive strike was organised by the women tea pluckers in the Munnar tea belt of the south Indian state of Kerala. Pembillai Orumai, as they came to be known, made history by forcing the tea company to increase the daily wage and bonus. They not only organised outside the unions, but also against them for their corrupt alliance with the company.

The strike was noted as a major milestone in the history of labour resistance in the global south. However, the uprising that turned into an alternative labour movement that started with 8,000 Dalit women workers collapsed and the membership was reduced to five within a period of one year. The paper revisits this extraordinary uprising, the larger transformation it generated by being a disruption to the disruptions (Sahlins 1982), and the contexts in which it collapsed within a span of a year.

This paper argues that the long-term sustaining of the workers’ uprising/movement depends on counter-plantation imaginaries (Casimir 2020) that challenge expropriation and strengthen their autonomy through resource mobilisation outside the plantation system.

About the Speaker

Jayaseelan Raj is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Development, King's College London, and a Fellow in the GRNPP at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit Life in the Indian Tea Belt (UCL Press, 2022), and co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-First Century India (Pluto Press, 2017).

Recently, he was awarded New India Foundation fellowship to write a book on Dalits and State in India. His research and writings have focused on plantation system and labour, caste, class, gender and ethnicity, agrarian capitalism and migration, and state and Dalit question in India.

We would like to invite attendees to join us at the IoE bar for drinks after the event to continue the conversation.

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact Alice Rudge (ar80@soas.ac.uk).