A Webinar on ‘The Morality of Abandonment and the Production of Plantation Order in India,’was presented by Dr Jayaseelan Raj, Assistant Professor, CDS over CISCO Webex Meetings on Friday, the 7th of August, 2020, at 3.30 pm. Professor Vinoj Abraham, CDS was the moderator of the webinar.
Abstract: The tea plantations in India have been going through a severe crisis for the last two decades. The workers, predominantly of Dalits and Adivasis, were the worst victims. Many of the retirees have not received their pay-outs. The youth who once aspired to become permanent workers were retained as casual workers. Many families had moved out of the plantations seeking livelihood somewhere else. However, the tea companies, as well as the Kerala state, did not intervene to ensure the livelihood of the workers in the plantations abandoned by the crisis. During my fieldwork, the workers often portrayed the abandoning of the plantations – and therefore of the workers- by the tea companies as a ‘moral failure.’ They explained how ‘sincere and hardworking’ they were during the heydays of plantation production. They used to work extra hours during high seasons of tea plucking in order to meet the demand from the company. Such exploitative relations were disguised in a discourse that the company’s profit will improve the workers’ situation – or at least, that was the moral expectation. This expectation doesn’t come from an emotional attachment to their labour or plantations, but from an implicit assumption of a subtle social contract that should exist between the company and the workers. This paper focuses on some of the subtle processes that contributed to the production of a moral order as well as the workers’ logic of questioning such a moral failure.