On the Margins

Planters, Rubber, and the Lives Beyond the Cantonments

There was a different kind of life lived on the edges of British India, far from the stations and the cantonments and the railway lines. It was the life of the planter, a man who held a concession in the indigo districts, or who cleared jungle in Assam for tea, or who took up ground in the Mergui Archipelago to plant rubber. These men answered to no company, no regiment, no government department. They were private men of commerce, set down in the mofussil, the up-country districts beyond the reach of town and club, and their living came from a crop and a market rather than a salary.

It was a life of independence and of risk in equal measure, and it carried the family to the very margins of what was then British India. Four of the family’s members went into planting, in three different crops.

Indigo and the Opium Department

The first was Dominic Rossetto, a Venetian who was also said to be a Count. He had taken service in the British Opium Department, which was one of the strangest enterprises of the British Raj. The government had a monopoly in the production and sale of opium, advancing money to peasant growers across Bihar and the upper provinces, taking their raw opium, working it into standardised cakes at factories at Patna and Ghazipur, and selling it by monthly auction in Calcutta to be shipped to China. It was the most lucrative and the most cynical of the empire’s trades, and twice defended by war with China.

Setting aside the question of his aristocratic status, Rossetto was a small wheel in the opium industry. He held a position that gave him access to power but not control over it. Like many such men, he also had his fingers in private business. His probate documents reveal that he held a half-share in indigo factories at Jelalabad, Marpoora, and Gopalpoor and a fourth concern at Farrukhabad, together with a half-share in a bungalow.

Indigo dye had been made in India for centuries, but the European demand created by the cotton revolution turned it into a plantation crop. From the end of the eighteenth century, British and other planters spread it across Bengal and Bihar and up into the North-Western Provinces. The system they built on it was one of the cruellest in the whole apparatus of the Raj. Crops were not planted on a planters land, but on land owned by ryots, or peasant cultivators. He advanced money to the ryot, and in return the ryot was bound to sow a portion of his best land with indigo and to sell the crop to the indigo planter at a price the planter set. The advance ran on from season to season, and it was impossible for the cultivator to clear it. If there was resistance the planter could use his factory’s armed retainers, Men could be flogged for sowing rice instead of indigo, have their cattle seized, or their crops destroyed.

In 1859, just two years after the sepoy uprising in the army, the ryots revolted. Whole villages refused to sow, and the refusal spread across indigo country in what came to be called the Blue Mutiny. It was met with prosecutions and evictions, but it had an effect, and a government already nervous after 1857 appointed a commission whose findings damned the system. Indigo never recovered its name. When a synthetic blue was perfected in Germany at the end of the century, the business effectively collapsed.

Dominic Rossetto married Elizabeth Dillon, the orphan of the Mutiny at Agra, in 1865 at the cathedral in Agra. Elizabeth had been raised by nuns after losing her parents during the uprising of 1857. She was eighteen or nineteen when she married him. Three years later, however, Rossetto died suddenly at Chhindwara in the Central Provinces, leaving Elizabeth lola widow with a young son.

Rossetto died without a will. His estate looked sizeable on paper, but after the lawyers, the debts, the government’s claims, and the cost of administration, almost nothing was left for Elizabeth. The closing account records a single payment to her of just one hundred rupees. Elizabeth, who had already lost her parents, and now a husband, was left with a hundred rupees and a young son to raise.

Tea and the Forgotten Planter

Tea took the family east, into Assam, and into a frontier that in the middle of the century had barely been opened at all. Wild tea was found growing in the Assam jungle in the 1830s, and once its leaf was proved to be the true plant, the gardens followed, cut acre by acre out of dense forest along the Brahmaputra. The difficulty lay not in the soil but in the labour. The Assamese had land of their own and saw no reason to break their backs on a sahib’s garden, so the planters brought their workers from far away. They recruited indentured ‘coolies’ in Chota Nagpur and Bihar and the Central Provinces, and transported them hundreds of kilometres up the river by steamer to work in the plantations.

The contracts that bound these tea workers could be harsh. A planter could have a deserter arrested and returned, and behind the genial figure of the tea sahib in his bungalow lay a system of confinement, fines and casual violence. Death rates among the workers could be high.

One of the tea planters in Assam was ‘Dick’ Burbidge. My father described him as a cousin but I could never find a relative of that name in the genealogy. It is likely that ‘Dick’ was a nickname. The likeliest candidate is Howard Harry Borradaile Burbidge who was born at Shillong in the 1940s. He belonged to the Cawnpore Burbidges, children of James George Burbidge, one-time station master at Cawnpore. The garden that Dick Burbidge planted is unknown to me, nor do I recall the name of his Assamese wife. She visited Australia in the 1970s or 1980s, but I regret that I don’t have her name, nor do my parents’ diaries mention her.

There was another tea planter in the family and his name was John White. He was married to Dorothy Chadwick, one of Cecil Chadwick’s children from his first marriage. Where his plantation was is not recorded so that he, too, cannot be fully described in this family history. His wife Dorothy outlived him and continued to live in Bangalore. They had one child, Carmel, and she continued to live in Bangalore after her parents’ deaths.

Rubber and King Island

The last of the three crops was the newest, and it took the family furthest of all. Rubber had been a wild product of the Amazon until seedlings of the Para tree, raised at Kew, were carried out to plantations across the East. When the motor car created an enormous and growing demand for it, the result was a speculative mania. From about 1905, companies were floated by the dozen on the London exchange to plant rubber in Malaya, in Ceylon, and along the Tenasserim coast of Burma.

Cecil James Chadwick was born at Arcot, in the Madras country, in 1861, into the southern family of army and apothecaries. Cecil had no settled profession through much of his life. When his first son was baptised at Bangalore in 1888, the register could enter his occupation only as ‘gentleman’, the word the clergy used when there was no trade to record. He seems to have spent his early manhood looking for the opening that India would not give him. When the boom in rubber arrived, he seized on an opportunity to manage a plantation in Burma.

In 1899 he married Margaret Summers, and in 1906, the year their daughter Carina, my mother, was born, he was granted a concession of about a thousand acres on King Island in the Mergui Archipelago, off the southern Burmese coast. He built a bungalow on the island and established a European household, with servants and a nurse. The work of clearing the ground and setting out the young trees went forward through the monsoon and the dry season. By my mother’s account, it was a happy time, but it was to end in tragedy.

The story is told in more detail elsewhere in this site, but it involved the accidental drowning of Margaret when she was trying to board the ship that was to take them to Mergui from Rangoon. After she died the children went to live with an aunt in India and Cecil married again, about a year later. He stayed on at the plantation until he retired, spending his last days in Darjeeling.

The Planting Life

The planters make a single pattern between them. The soldiers and the railwaymen were carried by their institutions. They rose or fell within them, but the institution held them up. The planters had nothing to hold them up but a crop and a price, and the crop could fail and the price could break and ruin them.

Indigo killed Rossetto’s fortune and left his widow with nothing. We do not have a record of how Dick Burbidge and John White fared, but rubber gave Cecil a few good years on his island. The planting life offered the largest independence and the sharpest falls.