The British, India and Tea
It has been a while since I wrote, for I was busy on the
home front with yet another move. I did not have to move far this time, and did
what many in America do, I downsized. In simple terms I moved to a smaller home
without a backyard and many of those other extra amenities, in order to make
our life after office hours a bit more manageable. Unlike what most people
think, we have to do most of the work ourselves when it come to the shifting
and leave only the final furniture moving to the big and the brawny lads and
their truck. So as you can imagine, it was a back breaking affair for the last
three weeks and at long last, we are
somewhat settled, looking forward to a new neighborhood, and hopefully a new relaxed
routine. After all that tiring work, I guess I deserve a stimulating beverage,
but naturally, a cup of tea, brewed the Indian way, with milk and sugar.
I did traverse this path in another direction some years ago,
looking at the tea shops in Kerala, but this is about the beverage itself, the
drink which is supposedly stands second to water, as the most consumed beverage.
For a while I was lost in my memories from a childhood spent in the tea estates
of Waynad, at least those vacations, the smell of the tea leaves in the curing
factory and the walk among the tea bushes. I have traveled far and wide, and
have had tea in many a continent, the Arabic versions, the Turkish versions,
the American, the British, the European, Chinese, Far Eastern, Korean and so
on, but I would still prefer the traditionally made version with tea leaves,
milk and sugar. Time has gone by and today you have all kinds of new ideas
creeping into the art of tea drinking, with peppermint, chamomile, aloe Vera
and so on added for flavor.
In Kerala you have many types of this popular beverage,
there is the kali Chaya, the kattan, the sulaimani, the Paal Chaya, the special
Chaya with extras of everything, the light Chaya, the meter tea, the biryani
tea, the kadupathil made version and the version with added spices or the so
called masala chai. Offices have to have a tea break and even the game of
cricket sports these ever important tea breaks. I am sure some region or the other
will have even more special versions and readers are encouraged to contribute
with comments.
As all these thoughts swirled around through the grey matter
in my head, I mulled a bit as to whether I should make this article light like
a Ceylon tea or strong like the Assam tea, and eventually decided to keep it
light, so here goes…….
Trying to find out when and how tea drinking originated is
quite difficult and there are quite a few conclusions, but most agree that it
all started in South Eastern regions of today’s China, many eons ago, in any
case before the advent of the Common Era. Legends and lore have also crept in
such as the sprouting of the tea plant from the eyelids of the south Indian
monk Bodhidharma, at Shaolin. Tea preparation and its drinking became a ritual,
an art so to speak in various Chinese regions and it is rumored that the
Manchurian method was what popularized the so called ‘builders cup’ or
concoction with milk and sugar. It is also said that one Mme de La Sabliére, a
French hostess of an influential literary salon during the 17th century, is
among the first to add milk to tea.
Some others opine that milk was added to stop porcelain from
cracking, or there is this story that unscrupulous employers added milk to cool
down tea quickly and therefore reduce the time taken for tea breaks. Tea cups,
saucers and the pots of course originated in China, so also the fine porcelain
medium or bone china in their manufacture. And as time went by, the Chinese and
British spent time sipping it daintily from ornate chinaware or brassware and
perfecting the art of serving and drinking tea in elaborate sessions, the
people of Kerala perfected the art of slurping tea from the omnipresent
standard ribbed tea glass! You won’t miss it, for that is what they serve it in
at any Chayakada, to date!
From those Chinese regions, tea traveled to the Middle East
and the Mediterranean lands to become somewhat popular with the Arabs though
coffee was their forte, till all of a sudden, they turned in the 19th
century to embrace tea. The first to port tea to Europe was either the Portuguese
or the Dutch, a matter still hotly debated, not really the British, but they
quickly caught on, as we shall soon see. Back here in India, the EIC had by
then firmly entrenched themselves in the various regions and went on to enrich
themselves and Britain with trade of various goods from and to India.
As we saw earlier, the French Madame de la Sabliere introduced milk tea in France where tea was considered the drink of the nobility (of course when wine was not imbibed) and across the channel, Queen Anne broke protocol by drinking tea for breakfast instead of ale in London, the coffee capital which at that time boasted of some 2,000 coffee houses. By the end of the 17th century, teahouses were commonplace, with the British drinking even green tea with milk (heralding also what we know as milk bottles).
The first tea house was opened in London by Thomas Twining
in 1717 where tea could be purchased. It is interesting to note that while tea
became popular in England and coffee got abandoned, the French decided to
forget tea and embrace coffee. Some of the French traders who lost their
business took to smuggling tea into Britain while John Wesley the Methodist
rallied in London against the effects of tea consumption. The debate heated up
when eminent personalities such as Jonas Hanway agreed with Wesley and writer
Samuel Johnson advocated for the continued and shameless consumption of copious
amounts of tea. Innovative methods were used by the French to smuggle tea and
the body suit used by some of these nefarious individuals to carry as much as
30 lbs of tea on their persona, reminds you of the design of today’s body
armor! As adulterated tea known as smouch was also finding its way into the
markets, Europe moved slowly away from consuming green tea to sipping black
teas.
As the purchase of larger and larger amounts of tea drained
British coffers, the EIC resorted to large-scale export of opium to China in
return for silver and that is why the British started to grow opium in a large
scale in British India. Thus the original spice business of the EIC slowly gave
way to trading and the growing of cotton for the benefit of the British textile
industry. Then came about the industrial revolution which destroyed the
handicraft textile industry in India, making the EIC change course again and now
the North eastern regions drifted to becoming fields of opium, the produce of which
the British pumped into China, decimating and addicting the populations there.
Opium trade enabled British to buy tea from China and as the demand increased
even further and rebellion loomed in China, the EIC decided to cultivate tea in
Assam. Thus came about the tea estates that we speak of today (the very same
tea estates which was home to those who participated in the Ehrenfels operation
in Goa during the Second World War!) many of which still exist in full splendor
even today. This EIC’s tea business made it one of the wealthiest organizations
in the world at that time, for it did cost a lot, as much as $1500 in today’s
terms per pound and earning the EIC, well over a 1000% markup.
Across the waters, the very same tea played a role in
Britain losing its colonies in America. 18th century was when tea
became omnipresent in all such matters. It was incidentally in America that the
venerable teabag came into play as a trader packaged Indian tea in sample silk
bags as samples for promotion, and the idea caught up with the ‘lighter’ tea
drinking populace. As the British lost America, India took the place of the
Jewel in the British crown and became home to the production of that magic
elixir and rival China as a premium producer of the magic leaf. So it was
towards the end of the 18th century that Joseph Banks made a
blueprint for the mass production of Tea in Indian estates though it was only
by 1833 that a decision was taken to implement it in Assam on a large scale. In
Britain and even in far away Russia, tea was even used to combat alcoholism, and
this you can observe from word teetotal, for it was a drink purported to be one
to instill temperate behavior. Tea was, later in the 19th century
the reason for the destruction of China, inundating the country with opium,
addicts and dragging it into the opium wars and emptying its treasuries.
To get to the locales and origin of tea cultivation in
India, you don’t have to stray further than Sadiya
in Assam where a British
Merchant Robert Bruce had espied indigenous tea cultivation among the Singpho
tribes. A bloke named James Gordon was sent to China to acquire seeds,
seedlings, manufacturing equipment as well as experts from China. By 1836,
thousands of seedlings grown from those seeds in Calcutta were sent to Sadiya,
Kumaon, Dehra Dun and the Nilgiris. The
Chinese experts agreed that the original Saidya tea was by itself quite good and just two years later in 1838, the first shipment of eight chests (3 of Pekoe and 5 of Souchong) of Assam tea found their way to London. The popularity of the new batch resulted in the formation of the Assam tea company in London and locating its Indian headquarters in Nazira. It was a huge success and the business soon started a rush with everybody wanting a piece of it (which resulted of course in a meteoric rise and a rapid fall of fortunes in 1865). Sprawling estates came into being, estate factories with newly invented drying machines processed the plucked leaves, but it was not very easy for the pioneers and life was difficult for those white men faced with malaria, wild animals, heavy rains toiling in a place far away from civilized Calcutta.
Chinese experts agreed that the original Saidya tea was by itself quite good and just two years later in 1838, the first shipment of eight chests (3 of Pekoe and 5 of Souchong) of Assam tea found their way to London. The popularity of the new batch resulted in the formation of the Assam tea company in London and locating its Indian headquarters in Nazira. It was a huge success and the business soon started a rush with everybody wanting a piece of it (which resulted of course in a meteoric rise and a rapid fall of fortunes in 1865). Sprawling estates came into being, estate factories with newly invented drying machines processed the plucked leaves, but it was not very easy for the pioneers and life was difficult for those white men faced with malaria, wild animals, heavy rains toiling in a place far away from civilized Calcutta.
Down south, it was a Dr Christie who first ordered Chinese
saplings for cultivation of tea in Coonoor though he passed away before they
arrived and they were first planted in Keti experimental farm and soon
abandoned after the building became the quarters of the governor of
Pondicherry. They were nursed to health by a French botanist named Perottet.
One Mr Mann started the Coonoor plantations after which followed the
plantations at Sholur, Kothagiri and Ooty. By 1869 tea grew in some 200-300
acres in the Nilgiris. The earliest record of commercial planting in Kerala was
in Peerumede around 1875. The development of Kanan Devan Hills by James Finlay
and Co. in 1878 with tea as an exclusive crop is a landmark in the history of
tea planting in that part of the country. Tea cultivation caught up in Waynad
and by 1889 planting was taken up on a large scale in the district. Wynad which
boasts much bigger plantations started tea growing around 1892 after the
failure of the coffee crops due to the copper rust. Estates at Anamallais (near
Coimbatore) started later, around 1897.
Nevertheless Ceylon won the battle for
attention as it was considered more salubrious and genteel, and Tamil coolies
were available from across the waters in large numbers when seasons so demanded.
So much so that by 1900 there were over 300,000 Tamil laborers working in the
Ceylon tea estates. However what the reader must bear in mind here is that the
Ceylon tea was considerably milder than the Assamese tea. The former was drunk
straight while the latter was mainly used to create fine blends of varying
strength.
Commercially the tea crop in India enabled the British to
double exports to 175 million pounds and in 1889, the Indian tea export crossed
the Chinese output for the first time. So much happened in those days and the
waters saw the appearance of famous specialist sailing tea cargo ships called
the tea clippers. A lot of interesting characters entered the scene, and you
might recall that Twining was the first to open a tea shop in London. Well it
was in 1890 that Lipton, the son of a grocer who was famed for his butter,
bacon and eggs business, landed up in Ceylon and built his estate named
Dambatenne. His vision was to create a tea which went directly from the garden
to the pot without any middlemen. It worked and Lipton went on to build his tea
empire, with his yellow label brand a head above the rest.
My wife is nevertheless one who favors the stronger Brooke
bond red label and so we have to see how Brooke did in this business. Brooke
started his teashop in London around 1869 and created the red label brand in
India by 1901. Strange isn’t it, those were times when tea went in bales to
Britain from Assam and Ceylon, then came all the way back in nice packets and
we acquired them with pride from the Spencer’s shops! That is marketing, trade
and commerce in a nutshell for you.
On the other side of the waters, while Yorkshiremen
preferred Travancore tea, Scots liked the stronger Assam tea. Irish and the
Londoners preferred Ceylon tea.
Tasseography incidentally is the art of reading tea leaves,
but has less to do with Chinese practices and was mostly perfected in Europe. LDalrymple in her NPR article mentions - When
tea first made its way into Britain from China in the mid-17th century, it was
an aristocratic beverage, but as trade fueled falling prices, the general
population began drinking it. Already culturally superstitious, lower classes
were quick to use tea leaves instead of some of their cumbersome and often
dangerous methods of divination, such as the use of molten metal
(molybdomancy), hot wax (carromancy) or the entrails of animals (haruspicy).
There are so many varieties of teas, some quite exotic, and
so a question - any idea what Sherpa tea is? Made with tea leaves, butter and
salt, the blend used in those regions diffuses at a lower temperature in high
altitudes. Bubble tea on the other hand is popular in the Far East where
tapioca pearls are added to tea made in condensed milk and honey. Herbal tea by
the way, is not really tea, but a tea-like drink made from flowers, fruits or
herbs while ‘Flavored’ teas, on the other hand, are made of real tea with
various essences, including herbal ones.
I was always intrigued by the art of tea tasting and during
my younger days, I’ve heard stories of a distant cousin named Appan who used to
do it for a career somewhere in Dehra Dun or thereabouts. As I read, it was a
French scientist names Francis Galton who perfected it into a science,
deducting that the best tea was made if the leaf was infused in water heated to
180-190 degrees F for precisely 8 minutes. Anyway, tea tasting is the process
in which a trained taster determines the quality of a particular tea. A tea
taster uses a large spoon and noisily slurps the liquid into his/her mouth -
this ensures that both the tea and plenty of oxygen is passed over all the
taste receptors on the tongue to give an even taste profile of the tea. The
liquid is then usually spat back out into a spitoon before moving onto the next
sample to taste. The flavor characteristics and indeed leaf color, size and
shape are graded using a specific language created by the tea industry to
explain the overall quality.
Giles Oakley a taster opines - It takes five years to train a palate to identify, blindfold, the
origin and blend of each sample and an expert is expected to be able to detect
not only the country that produced a certain batch, but the region. A
background in botany or science is useful but unnecessary – what’s crucial,
according to Oakley, is a good head for numbers and interpersonal skills. New recruits spend their first months
sipping their way through hundreds of spoonfuls of tea a day under the eye of a
supervisor, memorizing the names and groups of leaves and mastering the bespoke
language used by different tea companies to describe them.
I won’t agree with Galton’s method anyway, since in the Kerala
tea stall or chayakada version, the tea
brewing bag is in reality one that had
been used by the brewer for many months and had dregs from the previous brew
and the brew before that and the brew even before that, now looking like a
relic akin to a sad brown wrinkled and drooping sack (in Kerala the comparison
is with something else that I dare not print here). The concoction from that
bag after a good squeeze, is mixed with a liberal spoon of sugar and some pre-boiled
milk after which it is mixed by rapid transfer from a mug to a glass and back -
back and forth over a meter of space to produce a half inch of froth and a
supreme medium hot beverage served in that special ribbed glass. The man who
has been perusing the local newspaper grabs it from the hand of the server and
proceeds to noisily slurp it and continue with his daily ruminations on how to
tackle the vagaries of the world. That is how the day started for many a man in
remote villages.
The tea plantations in Kerala are spread around the Western
Ghats, notably at various Waynad locales, Munnar and Nelliyampathy. At Munnar,
it started when Kannan Devan hills were leased to the British Resident Col Munro
by the Cochin Raja. In 1880, AH Sharp planted tea in around 50 acres of land at
Parvathy, which is now part of the Seven Hills estate. By 1895, the Finlay Muir
& Company (James Finlay and Company Limited) entered the scene and bought up
around 33 independent estates. The Kannan Devan Hills Produce Company was
formed in 1897 to manage these estates. In 1964, the Tata Group entered into
collaboration with Finlay which resulted in the formation of the Tata-Finlay
Group. Tata Tea, the owner of the Tetley brand, was formed in 1983.
There is so much of trivia associated with tea, for example
did you know that the tea gardens in Assam do not follow the Indian Standard
Time (IST)? The local ‘unofficial’ time
in Assam's tea gardens, known as 'Tea Garden Time' or ‘Bagan time’, is an hour
ahead of the IST. The system was introduced during British days keeping in mind
the early sunrise in this part of the country and was successful in increasing
the productivity of tea garden workers as they save on daylight by finishing
the work during daytime, and vice versa.
Turks incidentally drink the maximum tea on a per capita
basis, followed by the Irish, UK and Russia respectively. There are some 1500-2000
varieties of tea and is a drink perhaps the longest in existence, going all the
way back to 2737 BC when as they say, the Chinese emperor Sheng Nung discovered
its taste by accident. And then again you may wonder who Earl Grey is, for he
is the chap who lent his name to some high class teas. Charles Grey was the PM
of UK 1830-34 and had this tea developed by a Chinese expert, to suit the
heavily calcified water in Northumberland.
I have been going on and on about this moderately priced
beverage, favorite of so many around the world and now it is time to drink my
cup. My wife is hollering from the kitchen that my brew is ready, but before I
go, I must quote Eleanor Roosevelt - A woman is like a tea bag, you can't tell
how strong she is until you put her in hot water…
References
The true history of tea - Victor H Mair, Erling Hoh
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once remarked, "Not often is it
that men have the heart, when their one great industry is withered, to rear up
in a few years another as rich to take its place; and the tea fields of Ceylon
are as true a monument to courage as is the lion of Waterloo". In many
ways it is also a testament to the Tamil laborer in Ceylon who toiled hard to
make the dream a reality.
