Plantations are a space of production, that absorbs the existing social relations. Plantations in India are a product of colonialism (Bhowmik, 1981; Raman, 2010). Labor relations in plantations take their root from existing social structures like Brahmanical hierarchy. There is a systematic alienation in the labor market towards Adivasis of Kerala in a labor-intensive production spaces like plantations. Hence, they are being pushed to work as casual laborers in coffee estates or plantations around Coorg. This paper tries to ethnographically document the marginalities operating in the life and work of Adivasis in coffee estates of South India. Marginalities rooted in caste-cum-racial and patriarchal structures operate on multiple levels when it comes to Adivasi laborers. Marginalities operate at multiple levels and are the foundation for discrimination, and precariousness in the labor market. This paper traverse along the life and work of Adivasi laborers in coffee estates, highlighting the importance of an anthropological understanding of the labor market in order to critically engage with the existing theories of political economy. Beyond, the core-periphery argument, and the international division of labor, how are new peripheries emerging and operating in labor relations is worth studying, as plantations are one of the initial channels through which metropolitan capital penetrated into the economy.
