The languages of tea-estate workers in Southasia: Part 1

This article is part of Dialectical, a Himal series that explores Southasia’s languages, their connections and shared histories.

FOUR COUNTRIES in Southasia – Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka – are among the largest tea producers in the world. The establishment of commercial tea plantations in the region by the British in the 19th century engendered the migration of diverse groups of people to tea-growing areas to work there as labourers. Many of these tea-plantation workers belonged to marginalised communities, and they brought their eclectic languages along to their new homes. Little has been written about these languages; the research focus has largely remained on estate-worker rights in an exploitative system. 

Here I discuss the historical and current state of minority languages that emerged on the tea estates of Southasia. Along the way, I also examine the emergence of some contact languages for intercommunity communication among tea-estate workers. Sadri, for instance, became a lingua franca among the estate-worker communities of the Indian state of Assam, who speak a variety of languages including Santali, Kurukh, Mundari, Sora, Kurmali and Odia. Nepali emerged as a lingua franca among the tea labourers of the Himalayan region, whose mother tongues are often Tibeto-Burman languages like Gurung, Rai, Tamang, Bhutia, Lepcha and Limbu. In Bangladesh, estate workers in the Sylhet region speak as their lingua franca an undocumented language (a spoken language with little to no formal records, typically passed down orally) known as Deshoali. In the tea plantations of the Nilgiri Hills, in the Western Ghats of northwestern Tamil Nadu, five minority languages – Toda, Kota, Kurumba, Irula and Paniya – are spoken apart from the lingua franca, Tamil. And in Sri Lanka there is Estate Tamil, the language of the Malaiyaha Tamil community in the country’s central hills, with a unique identity of its own to set it apart from Indian Tamil and the Jaffna Tamil spoken in Sri Lanka’s north.

This article, the first in a two-part series, focuses on the tea estates of Assam and Darjeeling. The second part will survey the unique languages of tea estates in southern India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

IN 1868, the India Museum in London published the first volume of The People of India, an ethnological study with photos and descriptions about various communities living in British India in the 1850s and 1860s. A part of the description of the Singpho of India’s Northeast read:

Although the discovery of tea in Southasia in 1823 is attributed to the British major Robert Bruce, it was the Singpho chieftain Beesa Gaum (or “Bisa Gam”), hailing from the village of Beesa in what is now Arunachal Pradesh, who was instrumental in introducing indigenous tea plants and their seeds to the British planters wanting to commercially grow tea in India. His contribution to the tea industry in the Subcontinent is still evident in the name of one of the oldest extant tea estates in the region: the Beesakopie Tea Estate in Assam’s Tinsukia district. 

Northeastern indigenous communities such as the Singpho and Khamti had been brewing tea long before the British colonised the Subcontinent. The Singpho word for (pickled) tea is Phàlap, where phà means leaf and lap is the word for the tea plant (Camellia sinensis). 

But celebration of this legacy can hide that many early tea plantations took over Singpho lands while restricting the Singpho to roles as labourers only. The tea industry relied heavily on the use of indentured labour, a system that emerged in the early 19th century as a substitute for slave labour after the abolition of slavery by the British crown. Under this system, estate workers across the Subcontinent – most often from British India – signed contracts to work for a fixed period, typically five years, in exchange for passage, housing and basic provisions. Indentured servitude was frequently exploitative, with harsh working conditions and severe punishments for violations. But the estates also employed various local groups. This included Upper Assam’s indigenous Singpho, Khamti and Naga tribes, who already lived near tea-growing regions; the tribes of the Kachari plains of Lower Assam, seeking seasonal work; and communities from Upper Assam who settled in villages around the plantations, as the historian Jayeeta Sharma records in a 2009 journal article. 

Singpho is a Sino-Tibetan language belonging to the Jingppaw-Asakian group of languages spoken in India, Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is closely related to the Jingpaw languages of Myanmar and the Jingpo languages of China. According to Ethnologue, an international language database, Singpho is spoken in the Changlang and Lohit districts of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh; and by a minority community in the Dibrugarh, Sibsagar and Tinsukia districts, and the Margherita co-district, of Assam. 

Four varieties of the language are identified by the Singpho community in India, three of which are named after the rivers near which their speakers live: Numhpuk, Tieng and Diyun. The fourth variety is called Turung and is spoken in the middle Brahmaputra Valley – that is, in the Jorhat, Golaghat and Karbi Anglong districts of Assam. Although Turung and the other varieties of the Singpho language are mutually intelligible, Turung contains a large number of Tai-derived lexical items compared to other varieties. This is attributed to Turung speakers’ contact with speakers of the Tai-Kadai languages. The Tai-Kadai (also known as Kra-Dai) family of languages are spoken in southern China, northeast India and Southeast Asia. Two of the best-known languages of this family are Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos respectively. 

Until the 1950s, Singpho was a lingua franca in the Margherita co-district of Upper Assam, and many people inhabiting this region spoke Singpho as a second language. This situation slowly changed in post-independence India, when Assamese became the lingua franca in this region. 

(The Italian-sounding name of this co-district has its own history. In 1884, the Assam Railways and Trading Company christened a local town after Margherita of Savoy, the queen of Italy, as a tribute to the Italian engineer Roberto Paganini’s contribution to the construction of the railways in the area.)

Today, the Singpho language is spoken by a mere few thousand people, predominantly practitioners of Buddhism, in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Some common words in Singpho language include num (woman), la (man), sat (cooked rice), ningjin (drinking water), sa (to eat) and lu (to drink). 

THE 1860s witnessed dramatic growth in the tea industry in Assam, resulting in a speculative boom known as “tea mania”. This necessitated the employment of a large number of indentured labourers in the tea estates. Between 1873 and 1947, more than three million people from various parts of India were brought to work in Assam’s tea plantations, located in the Brahmaputra Valley. 

A majority of these workers belonged to marginalised communities from Chotanagpur, Santhal Pargana, Ranchi, Palamu, Singhbhum, Hazaribagh and Manbhum in eastern and central India. These labourers were recruited mainly through two systems: one using arkatis, who were village-level recruitment agents working for private recruiting agencies in Calcutta; the other through sirdars, or sardars, who were senior employees of tea estates and were sent to their home districts to recruit labourers. 

The word “arkati” originated from the Laskari-language word for pilot or navigator. Laskari was a maritime language that evolved on ships plying the Indian Ocean, with words drawn from Hindi/Urdu, Malay, English, Chinese, Malayalam and Tamil, among other languages. Etymologically, “arkati” means a native or inhabitant of Arcot, in Tamil Nadu. The ship pilots of southern India, in colonial times, were supposed to have been men from Arcot, and hence were called arkatis. Another etymological explanation suggests that “arkati” is a nativised pronunciation of “recruiter”, which seems unlikely as the term “arkati saheb”, or “pilot sir”, is attested in French sources published in 1843. Sirdar or sardar, on the other hand, is a Hindi/Urdu word of Persian origin, meaning “leader” or “chief”.

From the colonial era to this day, the majority of tea-garden workers in Assam have belonged to tribal communities from central and east India (present-day Jharkhand, Bihar, Bengal, Odisha and Chhattisgarh) such as the Santhal, Oraon, Munda, Kharia, Kharowar, Mahali, Gond, Ho and Sora. In India’s 2015 National Commission for Backward Classes, 96 ethnicities are listed under the headings of tea-garden labourers, tea-garden tribes, ex-tea-garden labourers, and so on. A big proportion of these “tea tribes”, particularly the Santali, Munda, Oraon, Ho and Kharia, identify themselves as Adivasis. “Adivasi” is a Sanskrit neologism, literally meaning “one living/inhabiting from the beginning”, and denotes aboriginal or indigenous people. The term “tea tribe” itself is a loan translation of the Assamese sah jonogoshthi, or tea community. 

People from these communities spoke their own respective mother tongues, but they also brought along their inter-community language, known as Sadri, Sadani or Nagpuri, to the tea gardens. Sadri had earlier emerged as a lingua franca among various ethnic groups in the Chotanagpur region who spoke distinct mother tongues belonging to the Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Indo-Aryan language families.. Although Sadri is an Indo-Aryan language of the Magadhan branch, because it is spoken by many as a second or other language, it shows it has borrowed features and words from various other languages, helping construct a distinct regional linguistic identity among various ethnic groups of Chotanagpur and surrounding areas. 

When Sadri speakers arrived in the tea gardens of Assam, the language quickly emerged as a lingua franca there as well. Because of contact and convergence with dominant regional languages such as Bengali and Assamese, the Sadri (or Sadani) spoken in Assam, often characterised as Assam Sadri, differed in some ways from the Sadri spoken in the Chotanagpur plateau. 

In 1931, the Tea Districts Labour Association published the Language Handbook Sadani, a concise description in English of Sadri as spoken in the tea estates of Assam. The handbook was written anonymously, but the clergyman Peter Shanti Nowrangi revealed in his books that it was attributed to Henri Floor, a Belgian Jesuit of the Catholic mission. Nowrangi himself was a Sadri-language activist and grammarian who in 1956 published one of the earliest Sadani texts, titled A Simple Sadani Grammar. The handbook compiled by Floor was published to help British and Indian tea-estate officers communicate effectively with estate workers. It is organised into three sections. The first presents a concise introduction to Sadani grammar in six chapters, and  compiles conversational phrases to do with such things as settling on the estate, work, leave, the weekly market, land, marriage, funerals, forests, hunting, worship and sanitation. The last section has a bilingual Sadani–English vocabulary list. 

These sample sentences in Sadri, from a section titled “Work and Tikka and Earning”, tells us of the appalling living conditions, low wages, overwork and power structures prevailing in a typical tea garden of colonial Assam: Ka le pachhuale? (Why are you late?); I ke siraek chahi, nai to dhibua kamti mili (You must finish it, else you will get short-paid); Toen uriya ke taul men bhari karek khojathis (You are trying to get extra weight); Ekhan usraba usraba (Now hurry up, hurry up); Mor chhauwaman ke haluk kam Karwaek parbe? (Can you give my children light work?).

INDIA’S 2011 CENSUS estimates that Sadri is spoken by 715,180 individuals in Assam as their mother tongue, accounting for 2.3 percent of the state’s population. This Assamese variety of Sadri is mainly written in the Assamese script. There are also efforts in certain Sadri-speaking areas, like the Charaideo and Tinsukia districts in Assam, to enable students to learn Sadri at primary school and to train teachers about its linguistic peculiarities. The District Institute of Education and Training in Tinsukia district has made available a few online Sadri-language resources for teacher training purposes. The institute’s website features a short story written in Assam Sadri, titled Maṭi nicekera dhan (Wealth under the earth). 

Assam Sadri boasts a thriving music scene, with Jhumur songs being particularly popular within the language community. Jhumur is a vibrant folk music and dance form having its origins among the indigenous communities of the Chotanagpur plateau. Jhumur songs serve as a medium of storytelling and celebration, and express a connection to nature and community life. They are performed during festivals and social gatherings with rhythmic beats from a percussion instrument called a mandar. Sadri folk songs from Assam are often labelled as simply “Assamese folk songs” on online streaming services like YouTube, potentially misleading unfamiliar listeners into believing they are listening to the Assamese language. Assam Sadri also struggles for its due as it so far lacks any official recognition in the state.

While Sadri remained the lingua franca among Assam’s tea-estate workers, their mother tongues also received some attention during the colonial period. The Tea Districts Labour Association published a number of handbooks on some of the languages spoken by Adivasi communities on tea estates. These include two handbooks published in 1926 that focus on the south-central Dravidian languages of Kui, spoken by the Kandhas of Odisha, and Gondi, spoken by the Gondi people living in the Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra; a 1927 handbook on the Austroasiatic language or Sora, or Savara, spoken by the Sora community;  1929 handbooks on the Austroasiatic languages of Kharia, spoken by the Kharia community, and Santali, spoken by the Santal community; and a 1944 handbook on the Austroasiatic Mundari language, spoken by the Munda community of eastern India. 

THE EAST INDIA COMPANY acquired Darjeeling from Sikkim in 1835 through a Deed of Grant. Under this agreement, the ruler of Sikkim, Tsuphü Namgel, ceded the region to the British as a “gift” for the establishment of a sanatorium and hill station. This followed the 1817 Treaty of Titalia, which had already established British influence over Sikkim. Over time, tensions grew, and the British expanded their control, culminating in the annexation of additional territories that ultimately formed the Darjeeling district of West Bengal today. The name “Darjeeling” is derived from the Drenjongke word dojiling, or “thunderbolt site” – formed of doji, meaning “thunderbolt” (connected to vajra, Sanskrit for “thunderbolt”), plus -ling, a place-marking suffix. Drenjongke is a trans-Himalayan language of the Bodish subgroup, spoken in Sikkim.

The development of Darjeeling as a hill station and later as a tea-estate area required a large labour force, far beyond what the local population could provide. To meet this demand, Darjeeling’s first superintendent, Archibald Campbell, encouraged migration from neighbouring regions like Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal, leveraging oppressive conditions in those areas as push factors and offering wages and greater freedom as incentives. The resulting influx, especially from Nepal, raised legal issues regarding sovereignty and labour rights, but Campbell chose to prioritise the East India Company’s economic interests by tacitly supporting transnational migration. The establishment of tea gardens in the 1850s only intensified the demand, with Nepali labourers – praised for their suitability to the mountainous terrain – becoming the primary workforce.

Transnational as well as internal migration brought together speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages such as Gurung, Rai, Tamang, Bhutia, Lepcha and Limbu who shared their work and lives in Darjeeling’s tea gardens. Soon Nepali, also known as Khas Kura, emerged as the lingua franca among them. This was the result of a natural process of assimilation among diverse linguistic groups, and of the forging of a distinct ethnic identity in a vast country like India. At the time of India’s 2011 census, 39.8 percent of the population in Darjeeling district and 62.6 percent of the population in Sikkim spoke Nepali as their first language. Today, there are more first-language speakers of Nepali in Darjeeling and Sikkim than of any other language. This is despite the fact that these areas’ large Nepali-origin populations came overwhelmingly from traditionally non-Nepali-speaking ethnicities. This phenomenal rise of the Nepali language was at the expense of numerous Tibeto-Burman languages which became endangered because of the language shift in their native-speaker communities. Many families that earlier spoke Nepali only as a second or third language outside the home have slowly discontinued speaking their mother tongues in favour of Nepali.

In 1887, the Scottish missionary Archibald Turnbull published A Nepali Grammar and English-Nepali & Nepali-English Vocabulary, based on the lingua franca of Darjeeling. It was prepared for teaching Nepali to Christian missionaries, tea planters and military officers. A section of the work titled “Tea Garden Words and Phrases” relates to work and life in the tea estates. It contains phrases like chhito aija (come quickly), dafadar sanga jau (go with the overseer), patti tipa (pluck leaves), gora man chot lagyo (the foot got hurt) and bato chiplo chha (the road is slippery). 

In the late 19th century, Darjeeling tea was known in the Anglophone world as “Darlington” tea. Similarly, Cachar tea – Assam tea, so named after the Cachar area of Assam – was anglicised as “Catcher” tea. The name Cachar is related to the Sanskrit word kaccha, denoting a plain near water or a mountain. The Subcontinent and its products were mere appendages to the wealth and power of the British Empire, with the British as the biggest consumers of tea for most of the 19th century, and the real names and realities of places like Darjeeling or Cachar mattered little.

Whether in the Brahmaputra Valley or in the Himalayan foothills, the rise of dominant linguas francas in colonial tea estates facilitated communication among diverse groups of workers who spoke different mother tongues. While the contact and convergence of languages simplified communication and fostered social cohesion among tea-estate communities, it also contributed to the erosion of linguistic diversity in the Subcontinent. Over time, workers and their families often prioritised the lingua franca for daily interactions, leading to the diminished use of their mother tongues. Children growing up in these communities often ended up adopting the lingua franca as their first language, neglecting their ancestral languages. This shift weakened intergenerational language transmission and led to the erosion of socio-cultural identity tied to the minority languages of Southasia.