From the Tea Gardens to the Clinic: Adibaxi Health in Assam and Caste and Indigeneity in Indian Modernity, India Bluestone Rising Scholar Award 2026
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Abstract
The tea plantations of Assam, remnants of the British Raj in postcolonial India, comprise an important epistemic site for interrogating transformations in the ancient caste system within Indian modernity. Two theoretical interventions become possible through a social inquiry that begins in the plantations of North-East India. First, refuting the alleged “castelessness” of Hindu majoritarian societies like Assam in North-East India, the article discusses how articulations of Indigeneity in India are inflected by the caste-system. Second, it demonstrates the embeddedness of caste-based human differentiation within a central node of postcolonial development—the clinic. Analyzing caste as a trenchant ordering principle in India, in this article, I argue that practices and experiences of caste-based human differentiation have transformed in postcolonial India. The article describes how caste inhabits India’s postcolonial medical institutions in a new scientized garb, bolstering overt casteizing practices with a euphemistic discourse of bio-behavioral deviance. I demonstrate how the Indigenous Adivasis, specifically the tea plantation laborers of Assam colloquially termed as the Adibaxis, became the object of caste-based socio-biological differentiation both within the plantation and in public health institutions. One of the main conditions of life in the tea plantations of Assam is inadequate medical care. Taking health and healthcare infrastructures as sites of anthropological and critical caste inquiry, I describe how caste-based dispossession is reinscribed onto the bodies of Adibaxi tea plantation workers through persistent medical exclusions.
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