Harvest on the Hillside: Tea Workers, South India, c. 1890

Details

• Museum-grade reproduction of a sepia-toned photograph (c. 1890s)

• Depicts dozens of workers—primarily women—harvesting tea on a rocky slope in colonial India

• A rare wide-angle composition capturing labor, landscape, and layered humanity

• Digitally restored for tonal balance and compositional clarity

• Printed on archival cotton rag paper with pigment-based, fade-resistant inks

About the Artwork

This sweeping image from the late 19th century captures the vast human effort behind one of South Asia’s most iconic exports: tea. Against a steep hillside scattered with stones and trees, a large assembly of plantation workers—many of them women in draped saris—pose amidst the rows of tea plants. Their expressions are mixed: some direct, others lost in the enormity of the terrain. Taken during British colonial rule in South India, the photograph preserves a powerful visual record of labor, hierarchy, and agricultural rhythm.