What fuels a plantation: Energy, labor, alcohol and infrastructures of a good life in the Darjeeling Himalayas

Abstract What types of entangled material, relational, and affective infrastructures are revealed by researching trade in raksi (alcohol/moonshine) to sustain oneself and dreams of a good life in living tea plantations of Darjeeling? In engaging this question, I draw on two decades of longitudinal feminist ethnography and history of contemporary Darjeeling to underscore how regenerative possibilities are nurtured within zones of infrastructural abandonment. The affective infrastructures through which women plantation workers read, re‐define, re‐materialize socialist infrastructure comes from their practices of social reproduction, and of nurturing gendered projects of value. Wage‐strapped women plantation workers run informal parallel economies of survival that rely on women's creative use of remnants of India's socialist infrastructure (the rationing system)—transforming its products into cash friendly alcohol ( raksi) that diversifies household income while providing food. Raksi trade fuels plantation life in critical ways by supporting women's income generation and informal organizing through revolving credit groups called Ghumāuri . My findings complicate understandings of “plantation futures” which in recent scholarship has relied on frameworks such as remains to grapple with layers of deep extraction, dispossession, disenfranchisement and structural violence. This article asks: Can one thrive on post‐colonial plantations? Is it even ethical to depict survival strategies as “good life”?