By Anirban Bhattacharya
The records of tea consumption in India are first clearly documented in the Ramayana itself, after which they remain lost to the annals of history till early antiquity. Coming to the first century CE, the story of Buddhist monks Bodhidharma and Gan Lu and their involvement with tea are well-known enough that it need not be repeated here. Tea, being indigenous to eastern and northern India, was cultivated and consumed for thousands of years. The next reference to tea crops up in 1598 when a Dutch traveller by the name of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten noted in a book that the leaves of the Assam tea plant were variously used by Indians—as a vegetable, eaten with garlic and oil, and as a drink. Prior to the British era, it is entirely possible that the plant may have been used for medicinal purposes. While it would have never been commercially cultivated till the arrival of the British East India Company, wild tea, as a plant, was known enough to the general populace in 1877 for an Assamese to identify it from its description. The record then goes on to document an Assamese nobleman, Maniram Dutta Barua (also known as Maniram Dewan), who showed British surveyors existing fields used for tea cultivation and wild tea plants growing in the Assamese jungle.
Digging the history
The history of commercial cultivation of tea for consumption and export, in contrast, is very clearly delineated and detailed. We begin in the 1820s with the establishment of the first tea plantations in Assam (Chauba, 1837) by the East India Trading Company. In 1840, the Assam Tea Company was established which began the commercial production of tea in the region run by the indentured servitude of the local populace. The 1850s saw vast tracts of land being consumed to accommodate the ever-burgeoning tea plantations. By the dawn of the 20th century, Assam had become the single largest producer of tea in the world.
Here is a niggle—the tea industry in India actually began with 42,000 seedlings germinated from a consignment of 80,000 seeds “procured†from China; 2000 were planted in the hill districts of South India, and 20,000 each in the hill districts in Kumaon in North India and Upper Assam on the northeast frontier. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Let it never be said, however, that we forgot our very own Camellia sinensis, the native tea. Today, the Chinese strain produces Darjeeling tea and the indigenous Assamese variety produces the remainder of the tea produced in India.
Reaching the present
In the end, though, tea was too profitable an industry to not end up as an establishment. Summing up, Chinese varieties of tea were first introduced into India by the British, in an attempt to primarily break isolationist China’s monopoly on tea. The British, using Chinese seeds, Chinese planting and cultivating techniques, launched a tea industry by offering land in Assam to any European, who agreed to cultivate tea for export. Maniram Dewan (1806-1858) was the first Indian tea planter and is credited with establishing the first commercial plantations of the Assamese variety of tea. The widespread popularity of tea as a recreational drink (as opposed to a cooking accessory or medicinal supplement) began in earnest in the 1920s, after a successful advertising campaign by the Tea Board and several mass-promotion drives by the government, using railway stations as a base (Wikipedia, History of tea in India). And once it took off, the Indian tea industry has not looked back since, going on to become the single largest producer of tea in the world—a position it would be edged out of by China only recently and that too due to increased land availability. Indian tea companies have by now acquired iconic foreign tea brands like Tetley and Typhoo.
Government’s support
The tea industry in India can claim prodigious government support owing largely to its vaunted status as a mass employer. When export sales went down, the government has been sympathetic to the demand of the industry and its cultivators. It has passed resolutions supporting the industry domestically and even gone as far as lobbying extensively with organizations like the World Trade Organisation on the international forum. One example of this is the protest, along with the European Union, Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, and South Korea, against the protectionist Byrd Amendment which was formally known as the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act of 2000, as legislated by the US. This Act discriminated against non-US firms selling below cost price in the US, and fined them to pay the plaintiff companies based in the US. Since the protest, it has been deemed illegal by the WTO and summarily scrapped.
The Inter-Ministerial Committee (2003) has also been set up to look after the interests of the workers and to ensure the growth of the industry. Till date, its recommendations have been vital to this endeavour. The STL or Special Tea Term Loan has also been set up for the tea sector with terms structured around the favourable capital and interest rates for large and small growers. These are just two among a slew of measures that the government has adopted which continue to ensure that the cuppa remains flavourful, cheap, and wholesome to its patrons as well as its farmers.
Less is more
However, what is it about tea and its assorted avatars that make it so appealing an industry? Even trivially, tea is cheap, affordable, and addictive. Outside the house, it is most commonly and easily found at tea stalls that dot just about every street in India. The tea stall has become a ubiquitous fixture of the urban landscape and a cultural institution. And the phrase “Chai-Pani†literally means to offer guests welcome drinks and facilitate them in Indian houses as a gesture of hospitality.
Variations of the simple beverage abound as local populations adopted it according to their regional and cultural affiliations. By and large, milk tea is preferred but more flavourful versions exist like Sah, Ronga Sah (red tea without milk) and Gakhir Sah (milk tea) in Assam. In Hindi-speaking areas of north India, popular tea brews are Masala Chai (an assortment of aromatic spices and herbs along with black tea), Kadak Chai (strongly brewed tea, almost to the point of bitterness), Malai Mar Ke chai (where a full dollop of full fat cream is spooned into it)—the most popular ones you’ll find. People’s creativity throws up surprising twists down the years starting with the discovery of tea by accident in ancient China. I guess we’ll just have to wait for more such “accidents†to delight us.
Rich legacy of India
India was the top producer of tea for nearly a century, but recently China has overtaken India as the top-tea producer due to increased land availability. Indian tea companies have acquired a number of iconic foreign tea enterprises including British brands Tetley and Typhoo. India is also the world’s largest tea-drinking nation. However, the per capita consumption of tea in India remains a modest 750 grams per person every year due to the large population base and high poverty levels. From ?19,500 crore in 2011, the total turnover of the Indian tea industry is expected to be ?33,000 crore by 2015, according to the ASSOCHAM report of 2011. The same report pegs 90 percent of all Indian households as regular tea drinkers. The reasons stated are “tea is cheap, affordable, and addictive”. And yet, the annual per capita tea consumption in India was only 0.52 kg per person in 2009.
The Cambridge World History of Food (Kiple & Ornelas 2000:715–716), writes:
“In general, even though India leads the world in tea technology, the methods employed to harvest the crop vary with the type of tea and terrain. Fine-leaf tea is hand plucked, and hand shears are used on mountain slopes and in other areas where tractor-mounted machines cannot go. A skilled worker using hand shears can harvest between 60 to 100 kg of tea per day, whereas machines cut between 1,000 and 2,000 kg. The latter, however, is usually applied to low-grade teas that often go into teabags. The tea “fluff†and waste from processing is used to produce caffeine for soft drinks and medicine.â€
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