During Darjeeling’s early decades, “all the managers and assistants on the estates [were] Europeans,” the Darjeeling Gazetteer noted in 1907.
It is a remarkable fact that, though educated natives are much cheaper than Europeans, it has not been found economical to employ them generally, although here and there a few natives have done remarkably well, and have proved themselves worthy of full trust in positions of responsibility. The result is that although the industry in the hills is now fifty years old, it is still almost entirely in the hands of Europeans.24
The exception was Makaibari. By the time this edition of the Gazetteer was published, the estate was already in its second generation of Indian ownership.
The man, though, who originally began planting out the garden in the mid-nineteenth century was a British officer, Captain Samler. After five years in the East India Company army, he had deserted along with ten Gorkha sepoys. They raided an armory at the base and headed 150 miles north to the heavily wooded slopes below Kurseong. It was the start of the monsoon, and the men planted maize—which would later lend the land they settled its name, Makaibari, “cornfield.” By time the ears were tall and ripening, the military police had located the rene- gades. The men were prepared, though, and repelled a series of raids. Eventually the authorities left the fugitives alone. From the tea nursery that Dr. Campbell had started in Kurseong—the town hovered on the ridgeline above them—Samler swiped saplings and planted them on Makaibari.25
Meanwhile, down on the plains, a precocious fourteen-year-old boy named Girish Chandra (G. C.) Banerjee, from a rich land-owning Bengali family, ran away from home on his horse. With perfect English and impeccable handwriting, he found work on a British base.26 He was clever, says Rajah Banerjee, his great-grandson, and by sixteen G. C. had cornered the pony express service between Kurseong and Darjeeling and then began buying prime land. At twenty he was already the wealthiest man in region. He had also become a close friend of Samler’s.27
The British Crown granted Samler amnesty for his help during the 1857 rebellion, which some infer to mean that he helped track down and kill anyone suspected of taking part in the uprising.28 (Rajah denies this.) The government recognized his estate. In 1859, he was appointed agent for the Darjeeling Tea Company and made legal owner of Makaibari. Samler died the same year, but a month before passing away, he sold the estate to his friend G. C. Banerjee, the first of four generations of Banerjees to control it.
While planters and their assistants on Darjeeling’s estates were largely European, the laborers were all Nepalese. Cultivating tea in the hills requires a vast labor force, and manpower shortages have been a problem from the beginning. Even during Darjeeling’s pioneering decades, growth outpaced the available labor supply.
When the British began establishing gardens in the mid-nineteenth century, the population of the Darjeeling region was scant. Unable to get enough local Lepchas, they brought in Gorkhas from Nepal. Outside the region Gorkhas are best known for their legendary military prowess and ubiquitous large, curved kukri swords. The British fought them in the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814–16) and then incorporated them into their army.*
Save for one caveat, the 1907 Darjeeling Gazetteer carried the typical enthusiastic attitude of early commentators on their work ethic: “The Nepalis, who form the great majority, although extremely improvident, are a cheerful, hardworking, and enterprising race, courageous to a degree, and pleasant to work with, so long as they are treated with fairness and consideration.”29 But the gardens required not just labor but inexpensive labor, which was, as the Gazetteer noted in that global and timeless dictum of economically profitable agriculture, “a matter of vital importance to the [tea] industry, as cheap labour is essential to its prosperity.”30
Ultimately the gardens set up a system that would entice the workers to come and, importantly, remain. Along with daily wages, they were offered housing and basic necessities. Because the gardens were so isolated, they also received food rations. Workers and their families settled on the estates in small villages based largely on caste or clan. Spread over a garden’s hillsides and surrounded by fields of tea, these consist of tight clusters of small, wood-framed homes with two or three rooms and a covered but usually open-air kitchen. Flowering plants, herbs, and the occasional ripening chili pod grow in chipped clay pots, chickens poke around, and pale pye-dogs lounge in the morning sun. Garden villages contain schools, temples, a day care, and a medical clinic, plus small shops selling staples from potatoes and batteries to soda and umbrellas.
Pay amounts are fixed across all of Darjeeling’s estates in an agreement negotiated every three years between the Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA) and the Darjeeling Indian Tea Association (DITA), representing the gardens,* various unions representing the workers, and the West Bengal government. For April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2014, the daily pay rate was set at Rs 90 (about $1.60), with full pay for twelve weeks of maternity leave and two-thirds pay for sick days. Workers in the factories get another five or so rupees a day as they are considered “technical.” This applies to spraying teams in the field as well. The extra money is known as “pay-of-post.” Wages do not go down if a garden loses money.
But wages are only part of labor expenses. On top of salaries, a garden covers medicine and education costs. It contributes to a provident fund for retirement of fifteen days per each year of work, so that after forty years a worker receives the equivalent of six hundred days’ pay. Babies get formula, infants get child care (allowing mothers to work), and children get schooling. Upon death, the garden provides wood for a pyre or a casket, depending on belief or preference. Per week, each permanent worker is allotted just over two pounds of rice plus eighteen ounces for each minor dependent, and five pounds of atta flour plus twenty-four ounces for each minor dependent for making flatbreads. And, of course, tea. Clean drinking water is provided, as well as blankets, rubber boots, firewood, and lime to whitewash their houses. Some estates encourage farming by giving tools and seeds for growing cardamom, ginger, turmeric, and oranges.
Positions are hereditary. When a plucker retires, she can pass her right to a position on the estate to one of her children. Or sell it.
“Only in tea plantations are you taken care of from birth to death,” Sandeep Mukherjee of the DTA said. In 2013, these additional items were valued by the Indian Tea Association at Rs 93.97 per worker per day, just above the daily wage.
Talking to a handful of men who grew up on Makaibari, the perquisite they remember most fondly as children was getting balls and boots to play on the estate’s rough soccer pitch—a barren, flat expanse of dirt that drops immediately off to a nearly vertical ravine—among themselves but also in highly competitive intergarden games. While sport across India is dominated by cricket, Darjeeling (and Sikkim) is soccer country, and young boys frequently wear knockoff maroon-and-blue-striped Barça jerseys with, ideally, MESSI and the number 10 stenciled in gold across the back.