My colleague, Gopal, was in Assam recently to buy tea and he wrote to me, excitedly.
While at Balijan (H) tea estate, talking to the Manager, he noticed a young girl. Since the staff live on the estate, he assumed she was the Manager’s daughter. Until they were introduced, “Meet our field assistant, Manisha,” said the Manager. Gopal was surprised, not least because Manisha’s so young but because the tea gardens just don’t have many women working in administrative roles. It’s a male-dominated world, here in the gardens, and has been that way for its entire history.
[bctt tweet=”She talks about life in the tea estate rather matter-of-factly; it’s after all the only kind she has known.”]
Manisha Singh is among the few women who work in the gardens – and not as a tea plucker – and so of course, stands out. She’s young, cheerful, pleasant and tough enough to manage a team of 400-odd pluckers working a garden that spans 189 hectares.
Manisha has spent her life in the gardens; her father worked at the Digul Durrung tea estate where Manisha spent her childhood with her parents and two older sisters. She talks about life in the estate rather matter-of-factly; it’s after all the only kind she has known. Life was good, school was fun but there were never enough buses if they needed to get to the town. Plans were made around the departure and arrival of the sole bus that plied between the garden and the nearest town.
As she grew up, Manisha began to notice that there were not many women in the tea gardens offices. “Why is it so,” she’d ask her father and his colleagues. They didn’t really have an answer. “It’s tough work,” they told her, rather unconvincingly. Having decided that she didn’t want to leave the tea gardens, Manisha set out to try and make a career of it. The Dibrugarh University offered a Masters in Plantation Management and she enrolled in it, one of 2 girls in a class of 20. Fortunately for her, her parents were progressive enough to encourage her.
Rather predictably, the questions she has been answering since are, “Are you sure you want to work in a tea garden its very tough” and “What will you do when you get married?” She laughs, refusing to take offence to these questions. Instead she has decided to focus on her long-term goal of becoming a Manager.
“How long will that take,” I ask.
“20-25 years,” she says.
At 22, Manisha’s tea career began with James Warren, the company that owns seven of Assams best-known gardens. Manisha started at their Rajah Alli estate, and has since worked at Zaloni tea garden and now, Balijan (H). Starting as field assistant, she was prepared for the demands of the job. But far more challenging for Manisha was to have colleagues accept her. “First they judge you, and then they accept you,” she says, with remarkable insight into how people behave.
Those who work in the tea gardens have their homes right there and its hard to make a work-life distinction. The seasons determine the length of the working day. During the peak harvest seasons, between April and the Puja (Durga puja which comes in Sep-Oct and is a big holiday in Bengal and Assam) Manisha’s morning begins at 6am when she reports to work. It ends well after 7 in the evening with meal breaks in between. Cold winters, when no harvest takes place, demand an earlier wake-up call, and she is on the field by 4.30-5 am to oversee the pruning of the tea plants.
[bctt tweet=”The tea industry is going through a change in the country, old rules are being rewritten.”]
Saturday evenings are spent at the Planters’ Club and Sundays are about visiting family her parents live on another estate, Dhoedaam about 30 minutes away, while one of her sisters lives on Greenwood Tea Estate. It sounds like a tough and lonely life. But she doesn’t seem to think so, “This is what I wanted. To be independent and working in the tea garden.” Breaks in the city have her yearning for the quiet of the estates all too quickly.
The tea industry is going through a change in the country, old rules are being rewritten. One of Manisha’s colleagues asked his 12-year old daughter what she would like to be when she grew up. The girl pointed to Manisha, “I want to be like her.” And there blow the winds of change.
