A time for tea

About “A time for tea”

A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post-colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation is a post-colonial feminist ethnographic critique of labor practices in Indian tea plantations. Piya Chatterjee uses personal interviews, anecdotes, and a play to examine how gender, class, and race influence the production and consumption of tea. She analyzes the image of the tea box to show how it distracts consumers from the harsh conditions of plantation workers. Chatterjee provides a historical account of the Indian tea industry, linking colonialism to the gendered division of labor in North Bengalese plantations. She explores how colonialism shaped the patriarchal and class-based structure of plantations. From a Global South perspective, she highlights the intersectionality of gender, class, and race as mechanisms of oppression. Chatterjee also acknowledges her own privilege as a Global South academic and the challenges of representing the subaltern. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.)