India is a tea-drinking country. But it hasn’t always been that way, or even for very long.
At Independence in 1947, all but 51 million kilograms, or 20 percent of its total production of 252 million kilograms (555 million pounds), was for national consumption.7 The drink had imperial associations and was even considered unhealthy by some. “The leaves contain tannin which is harmful to the body,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his 1948 book Key to Health. “Tannin is generally used in the tanneries to harden leather. When taken internally it produces a similar effect upon the mucous lining of the stomach and intestine. This impairs digestion and causes dyspepsia.”8 Not until the 1960s, with the availability of inexpensive CTC tea, which was well suited to being boiled with milk and plenty of sugar and even spices, did vast numbers of roadside tea stalls appear and the drink become popular within the country. Extremely popular. India consumes more tea than anywhere else in the world, and the drink has become equally a symbol for Indians as for the British. Today about 800 million kilograms (1.75 billion pounds)—80 percent of its total production—is for the local market, a 15,000 increase since Independence.
But such statistics don’t apply to Darjeeling. Around three-fourths of Darjeeling tea is exported to some forty-three countries.
Darjeeling tea is the choice of the global connoisseur—and the well-heeled. At the upmarket Parisian tea purveyor Mariage Frères, arguably the world’s greatest tea store, with six hundred varieties of tea from thirty producing countries in heavy tins lining the walls, the most expensive in the shop (excepting some gimmicky green teas crafted with gold) is a summer-flush Darjeeling. At the poshest places for afternoon tea in London—the Dorchester, the Langham, Claridge’s in Mayfair, and even the Ritz, with five sittings a day, booked months in advance, jacket and tie required for gentlemen—Darjeeling teas are highlighted on the menu and recommended by tea sommeliers.
Perhaps most tellingly, it fills, insiders whisper, the most selective, discerning teapots of alclass="underline" those in Buckingham Palace.
Darjeeling tea’s story is romantic. Like all romances, it has a strong element of improbability, even randomness, to its beginnings, with false starts, near misses, and plenty of luck along the way to the plant’s finding its perfect home. The story is rich in history, intrigue, and empire, in adventurers and unlikely successes, in the looming Himalayas and drenching monsoons, in culture, mythology, and religions, in ecology, and even opium. All these elements have contributed to making Darjeeling’s tea unique.
But Darjeeling’s tea estates are also based on a system of farming that has become untenable. The future—the present, even—of India’s most famous export is under serious threat.
How will Darjeeling tea—one of the Raj’s greatest legacies—and even Darjeeling itself, a symbol of that era, survive in these high-tech times? Can such traditions resist the riptide of India’s strident economic and cultural changes, its modern ambitions? Can a product that requires such tedious, highly skilled, and lowly paid manual labor continue to exist with the rising role of education and technology? The aspirations of many workers in Darjeeling making less than $2 a day have awoken, inspired, no doubt, by dreams of software firms and Bangalore call centers (or even, more realistically, of being a Mumbai security guard or Delhi housemaid). In just a handful of years, worker absenteeism has shot up from negligible to as high as 40 percent on some estates. Simply put, few want to pluck tea anymore.
Especially when it takes a staggering twenty-two thousand selectively hand-picked shoots—just the tender first two leaves and a still-curled bud—to produce a single kilo of Darjeeling tea.
And that kilo of tea can sell for more than many months of wages.
This is far from the industry’s only pressing challenge, though. Can Darjeeling’s tea gardens, part of India’s living heritage, survive the area’s separatist unrest, which is pushing violently for independent statehood with protests that shut down the hills for weeks at a time? Or the unprecedented pressure on its fragile ecosystem and changes in climate? The monsoons have become stronger and less predictable and are often bookended by severe droughts. Temperatures have risen. Hail the size of baseballs can pile up three feet deep in a single storm. Soil erosion is a severe issue, and landslides a yearly problem, sweeping away fields, roads, and bridges, even small villages and swaths of tea estates. Even stable land is problematic. The soil is depleted, many tea bushes are old and dying, with little replanting in the last decades. Recent harvests have yielded only half of what they once did. “Counterfeit” Darjeeling tea, produced elsewhere and mislabeled, has flooded the market.
So this is the story of how Darjeeling came to produce the highest-quality tea leaves anywhere in the world, and how it spiraled into decline by the beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s also about the radical measures being taken to counter the multitude of challenges and save India’s most exclusive and iconic brew. The most revolutionary among them is not based on technological advances or automation but ancient practices grounded in three-thousand-year-old Hindu scriptures.
Tea is more than merely a drink—it’s a soother and an energizer, a marker of time and a measure of it, present at the most quotidian moments of daily life and at the most special. It seeps into life, and sustains it.
And at its source, the world’s most celebrated tea is more than just any crop—it’s the history and politics of India and Britain, the legacy of colonialism, the rise of global commerce and worker aspirations, the perils of climate change, and much, much more, writ large, and brewed into one glorious cup of amber liquid.
* For general values, Rs 55 equals US$1—the average of the last decade or so. Historic exchange rates are also used. Prices are accurate into 2014.
First Flush
(late February to mid-April)
Brass bells wound with garlands of orange marigolds hang from the entrance arch for the faithful to ring as they enter the tree-filled temple complex atop Observatory Hill. Clean chimes reverberate in the quiet, chilly dawn from Darjeeling’s highest spot. Printed prayer flags in bold, solid colors—red, green, yellow, white, blue—strung on hemp ropes between poles, pillars, and tree trunks stir in the spring breeze. A troop of pale-faced monkeys, whose connection to the holiness of temples means that they are left unmolested, roam and maraud, stealing shoes that have been removed by the faithful while they kneel, pray, and light incense and small clay lamps filled with ghee (clarified butter) to one of a pantheon of gods as morning sunlight gradually slides up the surrounding slopes.
The short, early spring rains have passed, and gleamings of verdant freshness are in the Darjeeling hills. Giant ferns blanket the mountainsides. Pink magnolias and camellias bloom, the first of the pinkish-red rhododendrons.
The tea bushes, stimulated by the moisture after a winter of dormancy, begin to flush new shoots so quickly that they need to be picked every four to five days. As the light filters through the darting clouds, workers pluck the young leaves: slender and lightly serrated, lacquered green in color, sprightly.
The finished tea comes out of the dryer grayish green. Steeped, it produces a pale-gold to almost-green-toned liquor that’s grassy with fresh-cut-field aromas and a floralness in its bouquet, intensely fruity in the mouth, with a hint—no more—of tartness. The season is still cool and breezy in the high hills, and that freshness carries on into the cup.