Why a “Dollar Zone”?
I have already pointed out in a previous post that the pre-colonial Nilgiri plateau was often and falsely depicted as an isolated tribal enclave, devoid of money, markets and the state, and how this fitted a modern master-narrative of “monetization”. However, the particular area in question was long known as naku-belli-simai (four-silver-territory; paying a tax in coins and opium to a nearby fort); and a dollar zone it became – well – after India’s independence.
As Jawaharlal Nehru once remarked during one of his visits to the Nilgiri plateau: “Change is necessary, change is inevitable, change should come from within” (cf. Hockings 2012: 641). According to local lore it was Nehru who bestowed to the area below Kotagiri the promising nickname as a “dollar-zone”. At the time, local Badagas had opted into the formerly British business of tea cultivation and industrial tea production.
The story of the Dollar Zone began with a group of 17 indigenous shareholders who joined hands, expertise, institutional contacts and money in order to construct the first fully mechanized and indigenously owned tea factory in 1945 (I am not entirely sure about the date). This was the foundation of a rapid development. In the decades to come, local Badagas set up more than 20 factories in the nearby area, while the so-called bought-leaf tea industry (i.e based on private tea factories who purchase green tea-leaves from a multitude of independent small growers or from leaf-agents who act as intermediaries) spread to the entire plateau and replaced in part the existing model of the giant colonial plantation estates with their inclusive factories, workforce and economies of scale.
Responding to repeated price-hikes in the international tea market, small-growers started converting even their kitchen gardens into tea fields. The second half of the twentieth century thus saw an almost complete transformation of the mixed and in part still subsistence-based local agriculture.
The “moneybush”, as the tea plant was now called, generated weekly incomes and it brought some general wealth to the region. Local Badagas, in particular, were soon able to employ (immigrant) day-labourers in order to do the fieldwork and to send their children to school, college and university instead. Some were able to purchase motorcycles or cars and to construct modern houses. Factory owners, however became the undisputed new elites among Badagas themselves as well as with regard to the wider local society – now crowding the noble club houses of the former British hill station. Not least there emerged a small but substantial number of young Badagas who started great personal careers as doctors, professors, politicians, film-producers, hoteliers, sportsmen, or who became influential as politicians.
Calling the place a dollar-zone Nehru was probably aware of the importance of tea as an export good suitable to foster the accrual of a particularly empowering global currency (Note that the rupee was still bound to British pound sterling. However, just a few years later, in 1966, it became pegged to the dollar). Yet likewise – and that’s what most local people prefer to say – Nehru must have been impressed by indigenous business acumen and the ensuing velocity of local monetary flows.
After all and though by no means independent of global value-chains, it was a late consequence of de-colonization and formal independence that Indians and Indian Rupees were once again to rule the place.
Cultivating the “moneybush” was thus not only the beginning of an entirely new model of indigenous engagement in a prestigious plantation industry which so far used to be controlled almost exclusively controlled by the colonial elites, but, more important, it was a true shift in capacity, participation and authorship that inevitably marked a new episode of local money in an age of global capitalism. In many respects the people of the Dollar Zone became the vanguard of this move and – not without the paradox of irony – the promise that was seemingly inherent to “dollars” at the time, became its very appeal.