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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Jayaseelan Raj, "Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian Tea Belt" (UCL Press, 2022)
Description: What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian Tea Belt (UCL Press, 2022) offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of...