Book Review

Asia

Piya Chatterjee's highly readable ethnography is disarmingly crafted with the skills of a canny playwright scripting the tension between the colonial and postcolonial on the backs of women's labor. Each chapter opens with a scene from a play (also called "A Time for Tea") that takes its cues from a number of texts (such as Mahasweta Devi's or Mulk Raj Anand's stories) and borrows from Alice in Wonderland's invitation to fall through a rabbit hole to explore a parallel universe.

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This split-screen narrative effect locates the reader simultaneously "in time" and "outside of time" through the construction of parallel texts. And indeed, as one moves from the plantation economy to the sociology of the plantation raj, one does form the impression, in spite of the polyglot peopling of this northeastern border of India, of regional, tribal, class, and caste-specific social worlds that exist side by side in spite of interlocking and interpenetrating work relationships: planters and laborers; memsahibs and adivasi women; Bengalis, Nepalis, and Bhutanese; Santals and Oraons; Lohars, Sonars, and Kumhars all inhabit parallel universes, often unknown to each other through the temporality of social distance. As Chatterjee herself occupies a memsahib position she must own but with which she disidentifies, limits are placed on the knowledge she can acquire about those other worlds.

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