"A John Hope Franklin Center book"--P. [i].

Includes bibliographical references (p. [383]-410) and index.

Content Page:
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
1. Alap 1
2. Travels of Tea, Travels of Empire 20
3. Cultivating the Garden 51
4. The Raj Baroque 84
5. Estates of a New Raj 115
6. Discipline and Labor 168
7. Village Politics 235
8. Protest 289
9. A Last Act 325
Appendix 327
Glossary 333
Notes 335
Bibliography 383
Index 411

Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system.
A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion.
A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism. Taken from the Publisher Site.