Tea Workers Day: Over a century since Mulluke Cholo, how much has changed for tea workers?

On the morning of May 20, 1921, approximately 30,000 tea workers left everything behind. Chanting Mulluke Cholo—”Let’s go to our homeland”—they left the tea gardens of Sylhet and began walking towards Meghna ghat in Chandpur, hoping to return to Bihar, Odisha, Assam, and the other lands from which they had been brought under false promises of a better life. They never made it. At the ghat, the British colonial police opened fire. Bodies fell and were thrown into the river. The survivors fled, or were captured and tortured. The rest, with nowhere else to go, returned to the gardens.

In his book, Plantation Labour in India (1931), Rajanikanta Das wrote that “kicking, punching, and various forms of physical torture by European officers against coolies frequently created situations of conflict in the tea gardens. In 1891 alone, 106 incidents of riots and clashes took place in the tea plantations of Assam.” Such resistance continued for years and eventually exploded into the major movement of 1921. Tea workers wanted to return to their homelands, and the spark spread across plantations in the two valleys. One of the immediate causes behind the uprising was the reduction of workers’ wages.

In Coolie: The Story of Labour and Capital in India (1932), Dewan Chaman Lal wrote that during the First World War, tea plantation owners made enormous profits, as high as 450 percent in some cases. Despite these huge returns, workers’ wages were not increased even by a single anna. However, when the post-war economic downturn began, wages were reduced to only three paisa per day. Even when workers earned three annas, it was not enough to support a family. In addition, men, women, and children alike were subjected to whipping and inhumane torture by plantation owners. As a result, many workers decided they wanted to return to their native lands.

But the tea garden owners were unwilling to let them leave and therefore intensified repression.

In his book History of the Labour Movement in India (1830-2010), Sukomal Sen described the Mulluke Cholo movement in detail. He wrote that European railway officials in Karimganj, Assam had ordered that no train tickets be sold to the labourers. As a result, many workers began walking towards their homeland on foot. Later, due to the intervention of Kolkata Mayor Jatindra Mohan Sengupta, ticket sales resumed.

The workers from Assam travelled through Sylhet towards the Meghna river port in Chandpur. Along the way, tea workers from various plantations in Sylhet joined them. Their plan was to board steamers from the Meghna ghat to Goalanda and then continue by train to their respective birthplaces. However, on May 20, the workers eager to return home faced a horrific tragedy.

As they marched towards Chandpur, under the rallying cry of Mulluke Cholo, Gurkha soldiers stationed by the colonial authorities fell upon them without mercy. Many were killed; for countless others, the dream of returning home died at that ghat. Trapped, they were absorbed permanently into the tea gardens of this region as bound labourers.

That blood-soaked day has since become a symbol of broken dreams and defiant resistance—and it is why, every year on May 20, tea workers across Bangladesh observe Cha Shramik Dibosh: Tea Workers Day.

More than a hundred years have now passed. The British are gone, as are the Pakistanis. Bangladesh is a sovereign nation with a booming tea industry—166 tea garden estates, over 116,762 registered workers (and thousands more casual workers). Yet, the state has never officially recognised May 20 as Tea Workers Day.

Tea is not merely a beverage in today’s Bangladesh—it is part of our culture, a foreign-exchange earner, and a source of national pride. And this institution was built, brick by brick, leaf by leaf, on the labour of men and women whose ancestors were brought here as indentured workers, stripped of their freedom and dignity, forced to clear jungles, plant seedlings, and build the bungalows inside which their overseers lived in comfort. Their descendants continue that labour today, earning Tk 187 a day and receiving some aid (including grain rations and primary healthcare), crowded into cramped quarters in “labour lines,” often without healthcare or educational opportunities. Official recognition of May 20 as Tea Workers Day would cost the government nothing, but it would mean everything to a community that has spent a century being told that their history does not matter.

The tea garden communities are home to dozens of distinct ethnic groups, each with their own language, songs, rituals, and memories. Researchers have identified 14 of the country’s small ethnic languages as endangered, and several of these are spoken by those living in the tea gardens. Children grow up learning Bangla at school, but there are no curricular provisions to keep their mother tongues alive. Kharia, Sadri, Mundari, Kurukh, Oraon—these languages hold centuries of history. As they fade, an irreplaceable part of Bangladesh’s cultural mosaic disappears with them. However, this is not inevitable.

Other countries have created frameworks for preserving Indigenous languages and cultures even within majority-language educational systems. Bangladesh has institutions—the International Mother Language Institute, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, the Ministry of Education, etc—to do the same. What is absent is political will.

Recognising Tea Workers Day will only be the beginning. The government and the tea industry should also take concrete steps to improve the lives of workers, including a revision of the daily wage in a way that reflects the actual cost of living; legal recognition of land rights for workers and their families who have lived for generations in the labour lines; allocation of educational resources that give the children of tea workers a genuine path forward; and protection of the cultural and linguistic heritage of tea garden communities under the remit of the International Mother Language Institute.

These are not radical demands, but rather the basic obligations of a just society towards people who have added, and continue to add, to this nation’s culture and economy.

Mintu Deshwara is a journalist at The Daily Star. 

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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