‘Backward geographies’: Contested lives and livelihoods in the tea plantation enclaves of South Asia

Abstract This paper draws on ethnographic narratives to critically examine the plantationscape as an ongoing site of ‘backwardness’, highlighting the everyday livelihood struggles of indentured Oraon labourers and their continued institutional exclusion. This study was conducted in the tea plantation belt of the Dooars area of India. The arguments in the paper centre the voices and experiences of the Oraon people, offering a grounded perspective on how subaltern group(s) navigate recurring liabilities amid constrained agency and uneven, often contradictory, encounters with the state's shifting narratives of (in)equality. The research, conducted via intensive fieldwork and comprehensive interviews, elucidates how structural inequalities , exemplified by intergenerational poverty, territorial isolation, institutional neglect, and gendered disadvantage, persistently shape the socio‐economic spectrums of communities reliant on plantations. These conditions exemplify backward geographies , highlighting spaces marginalised by historical dispossession, infrastructural neglect, and deliberate exclusion from prevailing developmental narratives. Engaging debates in labour geography, territorial equity, and indigenous marginalisation, the plantationscape is not ascertained as a ‘historical anomaly’ but as a contemporary site where colonial labour legacies intersect with postcolonial developmental exclusions and decision‐making asymmetry. I argue that, far from being a historical anomaly, the plantation remains a locus of ‘structural disempowerment’, perpetuating marginalisation and reinforcing mono‐livelihood dependency. This study urges researchers and policymakers to understand backward geography as evolving formations of exclusion, where marginalisation is spatially embedded and continues to shape the lives of those at the ‘edges of development’ across the Global South.