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.
From about 1870, tea gardens in Assam and Sylhet paid their workers in tokens, and the tokens held no exchange value outside the garden2.
The tokens were brass, zinc, copper or tin, or coloured pressboard printed with the estate's name1. Most were round, and some were octagonal, half-moons or semicircles. Many had a hole through the middle. They normally measured twenty to thirty-one millimetres across, roughly the size of a US nickel to a half-dollar3, and were plain-edged or grained. Most were lettered in Roman script, though the Assam Company Ltd printed its pressboard in Assamese and many gardens in Cachar and Sylhet ran theirs in English and Bengali. Pressboard came in denominations of one, two, four and eight annas. Some of the metal ones carried no denomination, only the garden's name and often a year.
Why the gardens paid in tokens
Paying a large, dispersed workforce in government money required a great deal of very small coin. The treasuries could not supply enough of it1, and what they did supply had to get there. That meant a government steamer from Calcutta up to Guwahati, and then onward into tea country over terrain with no proper road communication.
Around 1870 the tea gardens introduced denominations of their own1. A number of tokens were minted by R. Heaton and Sons of Birmingham, later The Mint Birmingham Ltd, and some at Calcutta1.
What the objects were, and how many
According to the collector Shankarkumar Bose, tokens have been identified from eighty-five tea plantations across the Assam, Barak and Brahmaputra valleys2, fifty-four of them in undivided Sylhet. Named issuers include Satgaon Tea Gardens near Srimangal, Teliapara and Luani. In the Sylhet region the managing agent Octavius Steel and Co. oversaw twenty-eight gardens2.
From the sardar to the shop
Wages were typically paid daily, and tokens were handed out early in the morning for the previous day's wages2, generally by sardars, who oversaw the workers directly, and sometimes by European managers. Each garden had its own moneylender's shop, where workers bought daily necessities with tokens. Agents employed by the garden collected the tokens from the moneylenders weekly, paying the exchange rate.
The Daily Star's account says the tokens had no exchange value outside the garden, so workers could not leave, even to visit relatives2. Penal contract law also bound them: from 1865 until 1908 a planter could arrest, without a warrant, a worker who ran away, as the history of the garden workforce sets out.
How it ended
The Daily Star, citing Nasim Anwar, says the system lasted until the 1950s and ended after Partition, as currency came into wide circulation2.