Counter‐Plantation Imaginaries: Deproletarianisation and Struggle for Autonomy in India

ABSTRACT

This article examines the decline of the 2015 Pembillai Orumai movement in India's Munnar tea belt as an event revealing the dialectical relationship between labour struggle and agrarian capitalism within the plantation complex. Although widely celebrated for securing wage gains through a historic Dalit woman–led strike, the movement's rapid organisational collapse calls for deeper explanation. Through longitudinal ethnography, this article argues that the movement's radical potential lay in its expression of a counter‐plantation imaginary , a direct struggle for autonomy and deproletarianisation that challenged plantation's casteist and patriarchal hierarchies. The subsequent escalation of repression by the plantation company, conventional unions and the state is interpreted not as a routine response to labour unrest but as a targeted effort to neutralise this existential threat. Conceptualising the conflict as a dialectic of competing autonomies, the article demonstrates how limited spaces of autonomy within plantation labour enabled resistance, while remaining constrained by enduring plantation structures that are inherently antihuman.