India has two models for selling tea, and most Darjeeling estates use both. One is through private sales, where the garden sells directly to a client—be it wholesaler or retailer—or uses an export merchant. Less than half of Darjeeling tea trades this way.
The remaining is sold at auction. A single brokerage firm—and a lone auctioneer—handles 95 percent of that. J. Thomas & Co. in Kolkata sells 55 to 60 percent of all Darjeeling tea, about 4.5 to 5 million kilograms a year.1 A weekly auction takes place every Tuesday.
On a late-June day, just two weeks shy of the ten-year anniversary of Makaibari’s world record being set in the same room, J. Thomas held Sale No. 26, offering early second flush teas from the 2013 harvest. Buyers began arriving at eight thirty or so, darting into the building from the morning monsoon squall that was splattering fat, pregnant drops.
The ten-story Nilhat House is a fine example of early–1960s functionalism, a niched and reticular brilliant white building, trimmed with bold, accentuated colorfulness in Himalayan sky blue. It sits a couple of blocks off the central square named BBD Bagh* along Mukherjee Road—originally Mission Row, purportedly the oldest street in the city—just a few buildings down from the Old Mission Church, a splendid 1770 building with a small, enclosed garden whose unharvested fruit trees conceal large, noisy birds.
Mukherjee Road is narrow and tree-shaded, for much of the day its sidewalks crowded as a subway platform. Stretching along both sides of the street are hundreds of semipermanent food stalls that offer everything from scalding-hot chai in unfired-clay cups to fried aloo bonda (potato balls). As tea buyers made their way to the auction house that morning, stalls were already preparing for the lunch crowd by peeling potatoes, slicing eye-watering mounds of onions, and getting blackened kettles of stews and dals simmering. Across from Nilhat House, an elderly man squatted on the street and ground copious amounts of coriander seeds with a long, cylindrical pestle on a coarse slab of stone the shape of a tombstone. Another slapped chapatis between his palms. Wide, woven baskets displaying mangoes and nested clusters of still-green bananas sat between them.
Shaking out their umbrellas, the buyers followed the wide, curving stairwell, lined with a wall of small tiles in vibrant shades of California blue, to the auction room on the second floor. With six gently tiered rows, each with a dozen or so seats and an aisle running up the middle, it has the feel of a college lecture hall. A square of wood attached to the armrest unfolds into a small table.
Buyers greeted each other as the seats gradually filled. Some made last calls on their BlackBerrys or stepped outside into the foyer for a cigarette. They all carried the day’s auction catalog, some fifty or so pages thick. Its closely printed sheets showed the lot number, garden, grade, date packaged and dispatched, number of kilos and of packages in each lot, and the valuation of the tea up for auction. Each lot had been available to taste beforehand, and buyers had put tick marks beside the ones they hoped to get—teas that fit their own purchasing levels and desired flavor profiles. A handful of women stood out among the mostly male crowd.
Just moments before nine a.m., three J. Thomas men entered the room. They shook a few hands as they came through the door and nodded to acquaintances, but didn’t dawdle on their way to the front, where a long desk sat on a dais. A gentleman in his sixties took a seat at one end, a man in his twenties sat at the other, and in the middle, a step higher and with a slightly raised lectern before him, was a man in age between the other two wearing a striped dress shirt, silk tie, and angular glasses that gave his face a somewhat severe look. This was the auctioneer, Anindyo Choudhury, the most influential man in Darjeeling tea.
Going under his hammer that day were 794 lots from fifty-some gardens, a mix of low-, medium-, and high-end—or priced—teas. They had largely been produced a month or so beforehand as the harvest moved from the shoulder banji period into prime second flush.
Choudhury’s copy of the catalog sat open before him. His right hand held a pencil to jot the final sales amount and his left a wooden gavel. No microphone, no laptop. At the back of the room, above the heads of the buyers, is a clock—the same plain, efficient digital type that hangs in schoolrooms, cinema lobbies, and rental-car agencies—which Choudhury watched closely. When the red numbers flashed 9:00, he began.
He gave the lot number, name of the garden, grade of tea, and a line about quality if superior. For most lots, he moved up in Rs 5 or 10 increments, but on some of the higher-fetching teas that fall for thousands, he would skip 100 at a time. For tea that had been valued in the catalog at Rs 1,000, say, he opened at Rs 700 to 750.
“Tata five hundred,” he called out during the bidding on an early lot, acknowledging the Tata Global buyer’s nod. Rs 505 got a nod from another buyer, and Tata agreed to 510. “Five-ten Tata,” Choudhury said. “Five-fifteen? Any takers at five-fifteen? Any takers at five-fifteen?” He paused only a beat and then said, “Knocking to Tata at five-ten,” smacking down the gavel. The two men flanking him both noted the buyer and agreed price. (A young woman from J. Thomas sitting among the buyers did likewise.) Choudhury penciled a quick note in his catalog and within a breath moved on to the next lot.
And on down the list, page after page, in a clipped, slightly impatient pace. Far from the chanting singsong of a southern-American auctioneer filling a room with a steady river of musical phrasing, or offering praise or eulogies to the tea on offer, his style is professional, perfunctory, even a bit dry. He only pauses to sharpen his pencil.
J. Thomas & Co. is the oldest and largest existing tea auctioneer and broker in the world. (The London tea auction ceased in 1998, after more than three hundred years.) The first public sale of tea in India took place in their Calcutta office on December 27, 1861, a consignment of 250 chests from the East Indian Tea Company and another hundred from the Bengal Tea Company. Originally named Thomas Marten & Company, the company began not as brokers of tea but of shellac, jute, and, foremost, indigo. “The color seeped from the packed chests [of indigo] and stained the length of Mission Row a deep abiding blue,” wrote a historian of the company.2 The current building’s name—from nil (indigo) and hat (market)—reflects its legacy in dye, as does its colorful trim. For a century the company was controlled by the British. The first Indian chairman was appointed in 1962; the last member of the Thomas family, the fifth generation, left a year later; the company’s final Brit departed in 1972.3
Today, J. Thomas handles about one-third of all tea auctioned in India—almost 500 million pounds (200 million kilograms) a year. It conducts auctions not just at its main Kolkata center but also in other tea producing areas: Guwahati (Assam), Siliguri (the Dooars and Terai), Cochin (Kerala), Coonoor (in the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu), and Coimbatore (a couple hours farther south in the same state). They also keep correspondents at the other main tea auction houses in Asia and Africa—Colombo (for Sri Lanka teas), Chittagong (for Bangladesh), Jakarta (for Indonesia), Mombasa (for Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Malawi, and others), and Limbe (for Central Africa).
Over the last few years, tea auctions in India have become computerized, with buyers sitting silently in a room in front of identical laptops clicking their mouse to make bids or done anonymously online, where buyers do not even know who they are bidding against. That is, all except for the Darjeeling tea auction at J. Thomas’s Kolkata branch. The tradition simply remains too entrenched to halt. Anindyo Choudhury is the only tea auctioneer left using the open outcry system.
Choudhury came to tea, like many in the industry, randomly, almost on a whim. “It was an unknown field, mostly word of mouth, family connections,” he explained in his office. “When I finished university”—the University of Delhi, one of India’s highest-ranked institutions—“someone said, ‘You want to try tea?’” Choudhury smiled at the thought, at the simple suggestion that led to his life’s work.