Coolie is a generic category for the unskilled manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for mobilized-immobilized labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized...