This chapter traces the colonial project of recruiting and managing indentured labour in the tea plantations of Assam through the lens of suitability, surveillance, and racial ordering. It examines how a diverse population of migrants from Bihar, Bengal, Orissa, and the Central Provinces was homogenised under the colonial category of the ‘coolie’, even as this category was repeatedly disrupted by mortality, desertion, illness, resistance, and memory. Focusing on the period from 1870 to 1880, the chapter explores official debates between planters, medical inspectors, and colonial administrators over the constitution of the ‘suitable coolie’, revealing contradictions between imperial policy, commercial interests, and racial ideologies. It unpacks the legal infrastructure—particularly Act XIII of 1859—that criminalised labour desertion, legitimised surveillance, and regulated the life of the worker within the tea garden. The study highlights how acts such as lying, fleeing, or feigning illness were forms of everyday resistance that unsettled the plantation regime. Drawing on colonial reports, archival material, and oral histories, the chapter shows that death, disease, and defiance consistently thwarted the imperial ideal of docile labour, complicating the British vision of order, health, and productivity in Assam’s tea frontier.