Chai Bagaan: Home, away from home

        As we went about from one village to next village for our fieldwork, we explored the place, villages, community, people, livelihood, culture, tradition, conflicts, struggle and many more things. One day we visited Kathalguri, which is in Srerampore on the border of Assam and West Bengal. In the whole town of Gossaigaon only Kathalguri has tea garden, named as Mornei Tea Estate and the rest all places has rice fields which is spreaded in many kilometers which gives a scenic view of green spreaded bed. 

        The Mornei Tea Estate has tribal workers like Munda, Oraon, Santhal and Khadia from the Chhotanagpur region which is meant to be in the central part of India. The tribal were brought to Assam by the Britishers of East India Company to work in the tea gardens. At that time, there needed a lot of hard work and struggle to set up tea garden as the place was hilly and needed to mend it for the tea cultivation. The Britishers found out that the tribal of Chhotanagpur region are hard working and can survive in extreme condition. So, they were brought forcefully to work in the tea garden leaving behind their home. Some of them took their family along and some left them behind in the village. It is heard in the narrated stories and recited in songs that there was no means of transport to Assam but only a train which was run by coal and had limited compartment. The tribal who were migrating were large in number and the seats in the train was limited. So, many of them travelled by walking and some went by train which seemed to be so crowded that many of them sat on the roof of it. It took many days to reach Assam, people got tired and exhausted walking such a long distance and so few died on the way.

      On reaching Assam, tribal were set up in small colonies in different places and were kept along with their belonging people so that they are still connected to each other. The colonies where they settled was near the tea gardens so that they don't have to go far off places to work and so it was named 'Bagaan' (garden) added with local village name. The tribal, though migrated to other region which was far away from their home but still continued to practice their culture, tradition, rituals, language and festivals. They have been trying hard to preserve their identity and so they still practice it. All the tribe have been collectively named as 'Tea Tribe' or 'Bagania', which means tribe of tea garden. But, the tribal have been  continous opposing the name that has been tagged on them and rather they want to be identified and known for their own respective tribe they belong to.  

       In Mornei Tea Estate, we met an retired tea garden worker named Benedict Bhengra. He belonged to Munda tribe from Kinsu Toli near Ranchi in Jhrakhand. He has a quarter given by the Tea Estate which is made out of tin and every house in his colony is made out of tin and so the colony is known as 'Tin Colony'. He narrated his journey from Jharkhand to Assam and the life history that he shared brought out how he and his people have now accepted tea garden to be their home and do not want to return back to his ancestral home in Jharkhand. While interviewing him, we asked him the meaning of 'Mornei' which on hearing he laughed and said the meaning is 'which does not belong to us' which translates from Sadri language. It was such an ironical sentence that he mentioned which reflects the struggle of making forcefully something your own which actually does not actually belong to you. He got so much into the conversation that he sang two songs for us, one in Munda whcih narrates the story of migration of his tribe to Assam and the other in Sadri which narrates the pain of a girl who is going to be married soon. He produced an example of a tribal who struggles to keep his identity no matter wherever he goes.

"What would be more painful than leaving behind your home"

By- Daisy Kujur
Email: daisykujurofficial@gmail.com