Tagged: sylhet

The Currency That Never Left the Garden

From about 1870 into the 1950s, tea gardens in Assam and Sylhet paid workers in tokens of brass, zinc and pressboard, many of them minted in Birmingham and Calcutta, that had no exchange value outside the garden.

The Investigation That Found Almost Nothing Happened

The tea tribes who pick Assam's tea today descend from the same colonial labour system that once sent thousands of workers walking home in protest. The government's own inquiry into what happened when they tried found almost nothing wrong. No one has ever certified how many died.