ONE hundred and five years ago this day in 1921, thousands of tea workers from gardens in Sylhet and Chittagong walked out onto roads of the colonial Bengal with a single desire — to go home. They carried no weapons and harboured no rage. They only longed for a return to their native land, their ‘muluk.’ The journey, brutally crushed at the Chandpur steamer terminal by the British Indian forces, has since become one of the most poignant chapters in the history of the subcontinent’s labour movement. We call it ‘Muluke Chalo’ (Go to the homeland) uprising. As we mark the anniversary of the uprising, the questions that haunt us is not only what then happened but what has changed since.
Making of captive labour force
THE story of the tea worker begins not in a garden but in deception. From 1834-35 onward, the British colonial administration, having established tea plantations in Assam, needed a massive, cheap and controllable labour supply. They found it among the most vulnerable communities of India: the Dalits, the adivasis and marginalised peasants of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madras and Andhra Pradesh. Communities such as the Kurmis, the Mundas, the Santals, the Oraons, the Bhumij and the Mahatos were lured, often fraudulently, with false promises of wages, land and better life.
By 1838, the first batch of the workers arrived in Assam. In 1853, the British parliament passed the infamous Workman’s Breach of Contract Act, which effectively bound workers to their plantations under threat of imprisonment, fines and physical punishment. Leaving the garden without the owner’s permission was a criminal offence. In 1863–1866 alone, some 84,915 tea workers died in Assam from diseases, starvation and brutality. They were not workers; they were captives.
The colonial survey of 1830 documented that workers had been drawn from 116 communities across multiple provinces, working across every corner of India’s tea-growing regions, from Assam to the Nilgiris. They came in waves, generation after generation, and over time, their original homeland faded into memory. The tea garden became their entire world, designed to keep them in and keep the outside out.
Blood at Chandpur
THE years followed the First World War that shook the colonial world. The Non-Cooperation Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920 spread rapidly across India and its waves reached even the remote tea gardens. For workers of Sylhet and Chittagong, already groaning under colonial bondage, it was a spark. Inspired by the idea of self-rule and driven by their own desperate conditions, they began organising. Their demands were simple and fundamental: a fair wage, a humane life and the freedom to leave the garden.
By May 1921, around 750 tea workers had gathered at Chandpur steamer terminal, men, women and children, determined to board riverboats and journey back to their native land. The steamship companies, acting on orders or in complicity with plantation owners, refused to sell them tickets. Trapped, hungry and desperate, the workers waited. Then, without warning, Gurkha soldiers moved in. Rifles fired. Batons fell. Many workers jumped into the River Meghna in panic; some drowned. The exact death toll was never officially recorded, a deliberate erasure of an inconvenient truth.
Those who survived the Chandpur massacre were not broken. Many continued on foot, through Dhaka, Mymensingh and beyond, only to be intercepted again, beaten, arrested and forcibly returned to the gardens. The ‘Muluke Chalo’ movement was crushed, but its memory remained. It stands today as the first major labour uprising of tea workers in the history of the subcontinent, predating and in many ways inspiring the organised labour movements that followed.
Changed name, unchanged reality
BANGLADESH became independent in 1971. The British left. The plantation system did not. Today, Bangladesh is home to 166 tea gardens, employing more than 140,000 registered workers. Including their dependants, the total community numbers approximately 600,000 people. They produce some of the finest tea consumed across the country and exported abroad. And yet in 2026, the life of a tea worker in Bangladesh remains a study in structural exclusion.
In 2022, after sustained protests that drew national attention, the daily wage of tea workers was increased from Tk 120 to Tk 170. The increase was celebrated as a victory. But in real terms, Tk 170 per day, roughly $1.55, remains far below Bangladesh’s national minimum wage for other industries and deeply inadequate for a family to live with dignity. The International Labour Organisation’s living wage benchmarks are not even a distant consideration. Workers are still provided rations and garden housing, a system that appears benevolent but in practice ties them to their employer with invisible chains.
Education remains a hollow promise. The 241 primary schools operating within tea garden estates are chronically understaffed and under-equipped. Only 5–6 per cent of tea worker children reach secondary schooling. Higher education is a rarity, bordering on the exceptional. Healthcare facilities mandated by law exist in name in most gardens. In practice, they are dilapidated, under-supplied and staffed by under-trained personnel. Maternal and child mortality rates in tea-garden communities exceed the national average by a significant margin.
Land without title, citizens without rights
PERHAPS, the most fundamental injustice facing tea workers is their relationship, or, rather, their lack of relationship, to the land beneath their feet. Bangladesh’s tea garden area spans approximately 111,663.83 acres, of which more than 51 per cent is under active cultivation. The rest is home to worker settlements, subsistence plots and forests. Generations of families have been born on this land; they lived and died there. None of them own a square inch of it.
Article 34(1) of the country’s constitution prohibits forced labour. Yet, the dependency system, combining housing, rations and social infrastructure controlled entirely by the garden management, effectively prevents workers from seeking employment elsewhere without losing everything. This is the invisible bondage of the 21st century, no less coercive for being unwritten in any law.
Eight demands for justice
AS WE mark 105 years since the uprising, we put forward the following demands, not as petitions but as minimum requirements of justice.
May 20 must be officially declared ‘Tea Workers’ Day’ and recognised as a paid public holiday for tea garden workers.
The daily minimum wage for tea workers must be raised to at least Tk 500, with a transparent mechanism for regular reviews indexed to the cost of living.
All tea worker families must be provided national identity cards, birth certificates and voter registration on a priority and time-bound basis.
Permanent residential land titles must be granted to tea worker families for the land that they have inhabited for generations.
All tea garden schools must be brought under government management, with qualified teachers, adequate resources and a pathway connecting tea worker children to mainstream education.
Fully functional health centres with qualified medical staff, maternal care facilities and medicine supply must be established in every garden.
A long-term employment diversification plan must be developed, targeting the creation of at least 250,000 livelihoods in and around tea garden areas in 20–25 years.
The distinct cultural identity, language and heritage of tea worker communities must be recognised and supported through state policy, documentation and funding.
Day of reckoning
THE workers who died at Chandpur in 1921 did not die for a political cause. They died for the oldest and most human of longings: to be free, to belong somewhere and to go home. One hundred and five years on, millions of their descendants still do not fully belong, not to the gardens that consume their labour, not to the state that benefits from it and not to a citizenship that is theirs by right.
Bangladesh prides itself on remarkable economic progress, apparel, remittances and infrastructure. But a nation’s true progress is measured not by its peaks but by the condition of its most vulnerable. As long as the people who wake before dawn to pluck leaves that fill our cups cannot afford to send their children to school, cannot access a physician, cannot vote, cannot own the patch of earth their grandparents are buried in, we have not progressed enough.
On the anniversary of the uprising, let this day be remembered not only as a day of sorrow but as a day of determination. The journey that began in Chandpur in 1921 has not ended. It will not end until justice arrives.
Mohan Rabidas ([email protected]) is child of a tea worker.
The Muluke Chalo movement stands today as the first major labour uprising of tea workers in the history of the subcontinent. Wikimedia Commons
