The picture is part of a ubiquitous motif in tea advertising utilized from the end of the nineteenth century to today: images of young, submissive South Asian women picking amid an abundance of leaves and seemingly lost in thought. Skeen & Company, the commercial photography firm that produced the image in the 1880s, titled it Plucking the leaf. Shot from below, her profile is set against a luminous sky, she is monumentalized, her labour seemingly effortless. It supports a large collection basket, nearly overflowing, but the woman does not strain or stoop under its weight. Her status as labourer is affirmed by the tumpline she wears across her forehead. Her body is bedecked with the exotic decor of bangles and large earrings the creases of her sari are juxtaposed with the smooth, shiny surfaces of the large tea leaves before her. Subdued before the camera, she stands stiffly, her hands resting atop a tea bush, posed in accordance with a romanticizing colonial gaze (Figure 1). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (RCS Y303E/7).Ī young woman is photographed on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka.
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