Introduction: Life in the Remains
Year: 2024
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Life in the RemainsAs dawn breaks over Darjeeling's cinchona plantations, a young man ambles across the lawn of a dilapidated colonial bungalow-a wooden mallet in one hand, a smartphone in the other.Bundled up against the Himalayan chill, he saunters to a bell hanging at the terrace's edge, waiting to ring in a new day.Below, the rooftops of villages tucked into stands of cinchona trees poke up from the mist.He stares into his phone, an incandescent beacon amid the morning gray.The pixels flash 6:00 a.m., and he strikes the bell in one confident swing, allowing it several seconds to reverberate before striking again.This is the wake-up bell.The ritual will repeat at 6:30 a.m., with the call to the morning muster, and again at 7:00 a.m., with the commencement of the day's ganti (counting).The routine has stirred many generations on these cinchona plantations.By 7:00 a.m., laborers are wending their way down footpaths from their homes to the maidan (field), where the day's ganti is under way.They arrive quietly in dribs and drabs-two here, three there-many still rubbing the sleep from their eyes.On arrival, they duck into a concrete hut to check in with their gangman, who records their presence in the plantation's ledgers.Most of the workers fail to notice the new vinyl banner hanging on the hut's side.Those who do, stare, perplexed by the message: Mero Bagan, Mero Garwa (My Plantation, My Pride), it reads, extolling the virtues of the land and work at hand.It is something of a head-scratcher: these plantations established by the British Empire in the nineteenth century have been in decline for decades.The quinine extracted from cinchona's bark is no longer the first-line treatment for malaria that it once was.With the pharmaceutical market for their product virtually gone, these government cinchona plantations no longer produce the lifesaving
Author: Townsend Middleton
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4396756852