Empire remembered: the intimate economy of tea in Assam and the making of ‘Chameli Memsaab’

ABSTRACT This essay examines the complex intertwining of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities in the making of memories about the colonial past. The essay uses literature and cinema as archive and intersubjectivity as the lens to argue that memories of the Empire are culled in the complex intersection of the subjective experiences of the individual and a community's collective perceptions of the past and the present. Accordingly, the essay calls for due diligence to the immediate postcolonial context in which the colonial memory project is ordained. At a more elementary level, the essay argues that the reduction of colonial experiences to a conflictual negation of the imperialist project impairs our understanding of the myriad factors mediating the colonial encounter. The polysemy of colonial memories reflects the multiplicity of intersubjective exchanges within a community. In this case, the Assamese short story, ‘Chameli Memsaab', written by Nirode Choudhury, and describing the affection of a benign planter sahib for Chameli, a coolie woman, becomes our focal point for entry into the neglected domain of Assamese literary representations of the European planter, that put a gloss on the dark side of Plantation abuses in Assam, to project the plantation economy as a desirable addendum to the Raj. Our survey of short stories written in Assamese, in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, reveal a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the unequal sexual exchange between the European sahib and the coolie woman, which we call ‘the intimate economy of tea’ in Assam, and which, as the coercive underside of the economy, denuded the production relations on the plantations of their putatively capitalist character.