the hills, I began chatting with the old Mukadam (supervisor) who had been working for the Morris family for many years before they sold off the estate to retum to England. He told me that he very much missed those grand old times of British rule when he could stand with a whip in his hand and get the labour to work hard as they should. Now that the whip was gone, he had to exert far more to extract work from the labourers. I was momentarily shocked but not really surprised. I had just been reading Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura that is a vivid but apparently quite realistic description of life on a Tea estate on the Western Ghats during the British times and the horrible treatment meted out to the estate labourers. Later ] met Paul Harris Daniel, author of an English historical novel “Red Tea”. He was a medical doctor and had worked in a series of Assamese tea plantations as chief medical officer from 1941-1965. During that time, he had interviewed workers, obtaining signed statements, developing material which he used to write the novel. Though a work of fiction Red Tea was written with an “explicit documentary purpose”. Mr Daniel confirmed that my understanding of the pitiable condition of labour and the behaviour of the European estate owners such as R.C. Morris and E. P. Gee, the British managers and the Indian supervisors very much reflected reality!1 That such treatment continues to this day became apparent during the tragedies of the Puthumala landslide of 2019 and Pettimudi landslide of 2020 when large numbers of tea estate labourers forced to live in miserable huts at the bottom of gorge lost their lives.
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