Paper short abstract:

With the use of ethnographic data from two tea plantations in North Bengal, the paper examines this language of protest of the women workers and seeks to map their perception of agency. It tries to explore the whole spectrum of actions which might constitute their act of agency. From here the paper goes on to examine the different sociological factors behind these various forms of agency.

Paper long abstract:

Tea plantations being social spaces can be conceived as gendered space. The socio-spatial arrangement places the women workers at a position of disadvantage both within the household and the workplace.

However these socio-spatial positioning are not immutable. The efforts of the dominated group to carve out their spaces within constitute their agency. But this agency cannot be collated with activism at all times. Often this agency takes invisible forms of insubordination which are aimed not so much at changing the prevailing system which subjects them to such forms of exploitation but rather to use it to their least disadvantage. While in some cases the forms of dissent are almost on the lines of activism taking help of the existing structures such as trade unions and non-governmental organizations, there are also instances of spontaneous forms of protest by striking work or staging demonstrations against the management. Alongside this, other apparently invisible forms of resistance may take the form of spreading rumours, singing songs about their plight and such other apparently innocuous actions which in reality express an effort to carve out a space within the prevailing arrangement.

With the use of ethnographic data from two tea plantations in North Bengal, the paper examines this language of protest of the women workers. It tries to explore the whole spectrum of actions which might constitute their act of agency. From here the paper goes on to examine the different sociological factors behind these various forms of agency.