Review: Soma Chaudhuri, Tempest in a Teapot: Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India

Abstract

Tempest in a Teapot examines the social conflicts at the root of witchcraft accusations and witch hunting in an eastern region of India from sociological, anthropological, and historical perspectives. Soma Chaudhuri, whose research interests concern social movements, gender, and collective forms of violence, analyzes this phenomenon -which arose in a tea worker community of West Bengal -using a combination of in-depth and extensive qualitative methods. Taking a critical and reflexive approach, the author grounds her research on a well-selected literature review that focuses on similar contemporary cases in other Asian or African populations, and on the early modern witch hunt in Western countries. She assumes that the witch hunt in the community that she investigated stems from the transition from agricultural work to industrial wage labor, and from the relationship between the industrial economy and wage laborers. She interprets the phenomenon as a periodic reaction from the community of tribal workers against the plantation management. In her analysis, tea plantation workers are considered as historical subjects: their subjective experiences within those specific tea plantations are the results of a complex and slow economic, religious, and political transition in the tribal workers' communities of East India. The caste-based stratification of precolonial India, the construction of wildness in colonial India, and the Marxian explanation of the relationships between owners and workers are key concepts identified by Chaudhuri to understand the representations and the relationships between tribal workers and planters. The question of gender, the author argues, is only one part of the puzzle and does not allow a complete and exhaustive analysis of the social problem of witchcraft accusations. Socioeconomic changes in that community have attached new shapes, meanings, and notions to the tradition of witchcraft accusations. Chaudhuri seeks to understand and explain the place of the tribal migrant worker within the context of plantation politics of patriarchy and patronage; how the accusations can be analyzed as different from previous forms of accusation; and how the accusations can be explained against the background of the plantation economy.