Tea-garden community

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The Tea-garden community is a term for a multiethnic, multicultural group of tea garden workers and their descendants in Assam. They are officially referred to as Tea-tribes by the government of Assam^[1] and notified as Other Backward Classes (OBC).^[2][3] They are the descendants of peoples from multiple tribal and caste groups brought by the British colonial planters as indentured labourers from the regions of present-day Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh into colonial Assam during the 1860-90s in multiple phases to work in tea gardens. They are found mainly in those districts of Upper Assam and Northern Brahmaputra belt where there is a high concentration of tea gardens, like Kokrajhar, Udalguri, Sonitpur, Biswanath, Nagaon, Golaghat, Jorhat, Sivasagar, Charaideo, Dibrugarh, Tinsukia, and Lakhimpur. There is a sizeable population of the community in the Barak Valley region of Assam as well in the districts of Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi. The total population is estimated to be around 7 million,^[4] of which an estimated 4.5 million reside in residential quarters built inside 799 tea estates spread across tea-growing regions of Assam. Another 2.5 million reside in the nearby villages spread across those tea-growing regions. They speak multiple languages, including Sora, Odia, Assam Sadri, Sambalpuri, Kurmali, Santali, Kurukh, Kharia, Kui, Chhattisgarhi, Gondi and Mundari. Assam Sadri, distinguished from the Sadri language,^[5] serves as lingua franca among the community.^[6]

A sizeable section of the community, particularly those having Scheduled Tribe status in other states of India and living mainly in the village areas other than tea gardens, prefers to call themselves "Adivasi" and are known by that term in Assam, whereas the Scheduled Tribes of Assam are known as Tribe.^[7] Many tea garden community members are tribals like Munda, Santhal, Kurukh, Gonds, Bhumij and others. According to the Lokur Committee (1965) they formed around 20 lakh.^[8] They have been demanding Scheduled Tribe status in Assam, but the tribal organization of Assam is against it, which has resulted in several clashes between them and deaths.^{[9][10][11][12]}