TRIBAL TEA PLANTATION WORKERS AND THEIR HEALTH by Dr. Surojit Sen Gupta

The Book

The health care practices among the tribal are the indispensable part of their culture. Primarily deriving from their own indigenous knowledge stock, tribal people have nurtured their own health care system organically linked with culture, tradition and ecology. Tribal health also depends on socio-economic and magico-religious practices. At the same time tribal health and their traditional healing practices are not only influenced by medicines but also influenced by socio-cultural, rituals, traditional religious faith, belief, environment, ecology and forest.  It conveys a meaning of disease not simply left to scrutiny of medical treatment but subjected to culture and traditional medical practices. For the last few decades the tribal people have been witnessing a gradual erosion of their ecology and traditional medicinal practices with the ruthless encroachment of human settlement. Although the advent of modern medicinal practices has remained less accessible to the tribal but certainly it has found some place in their indigenous healthcare system.

Keeping this background the book examines the Social and Cultural Dimension of Health of Tribal Tea Plantation Workers in Tripura. As in Tripura with the establishment of tea plantation in mid-nineteenth century this industry recruited tribal people as workers from distant places. Since then tea plantation workers are overwhelmingly of tribal origin. The tea plantation labourers in Tripura consist of various tribal communities, namely, Munda, Oraon, Santal, Bhill and other migrated tribal communities. The people with diverse social and cultural background had traditional pattern of health practices in their villages of origin and they migrated at Tripura to the tea plantation along with their traditional ‘sub-culture of medicine’. Thus, this book looks into the major areas of health culture of tribal workers of tea plantation in Tripura. 

This book will prove to be a leading work in tribal health and will be useful for students and scholars engaged in interdisciplinary studies as well as for policy planners in this field.

The Author

Dr. Surojit Sen Gupta graduated with Honours in Sociology, did his M.A. (Sociology), B.Ed., LL.B., Ph.D., from North Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong. His academic credentials are further attested by wide ranging research experience evidenced by publications in research journals, edited volumes and seminar proceedings. Dr. Sen Gupta is the author of five books, Urban Social Structure – A Study of a Hill City (2006), Television and College Students (2010), Socio-Economic Study of Tribal Migrant Labourers in Agartala (2015), Environment Awareness in the Hills (2017) and Relation Between Nature and Tribal Culture in Tripura (2020). He is also the editor of the book Tribal Education in Search of Quality (2020) and co-editor of the book Tribal Life and Forest Resource Management (2017). Dr. Sen Gupta is a life member of North-East India Council for Social Science Research, Shillong and an active member of Sanskriti – North Eastern Institute of Cultural Research, Guwahati. His interest lies in Urban Sociology, Environmental Sociology, Sociology of Communication, Health Sociology and Sociology of North-East India.

Presently Dr. Sen Gupta is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Maharaja Bir Bikram College, Agartala, Tripura a premier institution of higher learning in North-East India.