Demand for Darjeeling tea plummeted and prices followed suit. That meant even less money to keep up the estates or reinvest in improving them. Many fell into ruinous conditions, were abandoned, or sold off. The total number of gardens, which had stood at 102 in 1990, fell to 83 by 1995.15
So Darjeeling turned its attention to Western Europe and Japan. To satisfy the Soviets’ preference for big brews, heavy on liquor but less so on flavors or aromas, many Darjeeling estates had planted at least some Assam leaf, often on their lower, warmer sections. Estates began pulling these up and replanting with the smaller-leaf, slower-growing, and lower-yielding China jat on which Darjeeling’s fame largely rests. Along with these, they began planting some of the excellent high-end cultivars grown from cuttings of strains well suited for Darjeeling’s conditions that were being developed. And the gardens also began to urgently adopt farming practices that reduced their chemical and pesticide residues to permissible levels. With the Soviets, this had not been a concern, but Europeans were becoming much more conscious of the issue.16
Today, most Darjeeling tea is exported. The majority goes to Europe, and now sales being hit by the Eurozone crisis. “You can’t avoid drinking water, but you can avoid drinking Darjeeling tea,” said Mukherjee.
After independence, the Indian government began rupee-to-ruble trading with the USSR for machinery and fuel to grease its industrial revolution.17 Tea was an important part of the goods that India bartered in exchange.18 The concept was not new. The Chinese traded tea with the Tibetans for warhorses as far back as the seventh century, with the Russians for furs from Siberia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then with the British—indirectly—for opium in the nineteenth.
In the spring of 2013, India once again floated the idea of bartering tea for oil, this time with Iran. “Iran used to be the highest paymaster,” said Namring’s H. R. Chaudhary, who has been managing in Darjeeling since 1971. “They went for quality, while the Russians, quantity.” Europe and Japan today are, in Chaudhary’s phrase, Darjeeling’s top paymasters, and Iran may join them, at least in kind, in oil.
It seems more likely, though, that Russia, with its emerging moneyed class, could pay the highest amounts. An October 2013 charity auction in Moscow that offered 1.2-kilogram (2.6-pound) lots of first flush teas from twenty different Darjeeling gardens showed widespread interest. Chamong received $1,076 for one of their lots, but the winning bid went to a Castleton tea for $1,384.19
Today tea planter is a synonym for garden manager or superintendent. Though considered the most humble title of the trio, it retains romantic associations.
No one symbolizes that romance in Darjeeling more than Swaraj Kumar “Rajah” Banerjee on Makaibari. Rajah means “king” or “prince”; the nickname was earned at Goethals Memorial School, a Catholic boarding school between Kurseong and Darjeeling run by the Irish Christian Brothers, when he led a group of junior boys against senior bullies. The name stuck. Around Darjeeling, he is, by some distance, the most famous man in the business, and it feels appropriate. He has his world record, of course. He’s published a glossy book, a documentary has been made about him, and the media make a direct line for Makaibari when looking for a sound bite or television segment on Darjeeling tea. Guests arrive daily, from famous agronomists and foreign tea makers to students.*
As he strolls confidently through Makaibari or sits behind his wide desks handling a stream of petitions, the title seems particularly fitting. He cares for the business as well as the aesthetics: he is house manager and head chef. He looks after its vision as well as day-to-day minutiae.
Nearly all of Darjeeling’s tea estates are owned by Indian companies that have their headquarters in Kolkata. Some are small, family-run organizations with just a couple of properties in their portfolios. The owners of Glenburn have a single garden in Darjeeling and another in Assam, as is the case with Goomtee and also Jungpana. Selimbong has one in Darjeeling and another in Dooars. The Saria family, which controls Rohini and Gopaldhara, has another pair of tea estates in the Dooars. These tend to be run by multigenerations and passed down through the family.
Darjeeling, though, has, over the last few decades, become dominated by a handful of larger, in some cases global, groups that have been snapping up gardens appearing on the market. The Bagaria Group, with interests in steel, real estate, and wind farms along with tea, has three gardens, including two of the largest in Darjeeling (Phuguri and Gayabaree & Millikthong). The Goodricke Group—part of Camellia Plc UK, one of the last surviving London-controlled tea companies in India—owns eight gardens in Darjeeling, including the preeminent properties of Castleton, Margaret’s Hope, Barnesbeg, and Thurbo. (They also have eleven gardens in Assam and another dozen in Dooars.) Jay Shree, part of the industrial conglomerate B. K. Birla Group, which refers to itself as the “First Family of India Inc.,” has twenty-two gardens in India, six of them in Darjeeling, which produce about 11 percent of the area’s total output. Ambootia’s eleven gardens contribute more than 12 percent of that. Currently the Chamong group is the largest in the area, with thirteen gardens—eleven acquired between 2001 and 2004—that produce around 20 percent of Darjeeling’s total tea.
All of these estates are run by managers who live on-site. They might have to decide exactly when the tea should be picked and exactly how it gets processed, but they answer to stakeholders often more concerned with numbers and shorter-term gains.
Yet, while some managers are almost clerks taking orders from the head office in distant Kolkata, this seems to be the exception. Darjeeling’s tea planters are different from those elsewhere. To be successful in these hills, they must have deep passion. Even those running an estate for the largest groups care as much for the garden as if it were their own. While most managers start in the Dooars or Assam—where there are more gardens, more tea, and more job—once they end up at Darjeeling, they stay.
“Other areas don’t have the history that Darjeeling has and don’t have people who have lived there for more than twenty years,” Vikram Mittal, the owner of Mittal Stores in New Delhi’s Sunder Nagar market, said. As a top taster, blender, and merchant specializing in premium Indian teas, he is Sanjay Kapur’s (and Aap Ki Pasand’s) only real competitor in Delhi. Mittal’s father opened the shop in 1954. Originally it sold a hundred items including tea. (Why tea? “The horoscope of my father said he should sell something black.”) Gradually the other products fell away, and in 1978 it became a dedicated tea shop. Mittal Stores’ selection is not extensive but is well chosen. Nonetheless, it doesn’t fit inside the tiny shop. When it opens in the morning, a pair of assistants cart out large metal tins with tea, cardboard boxes, and sacks of bags and labels, and stack them in front of the shop in order to make room for customers. In the evening, they move it all back inside.
“People who fall in love with this place don’t want to go anywhere else,” Mittal observed. “They start interacting with the plants and factory and begin doing amazing things. Many of the people who have been producing good tea in Darjeeling do not have a lot of education but have a fertile mind. Over the years they have learned how, and when, to produce the best tea.” There is no specific teacher-led training, but rather a clear sense of apprenticeship and learning on the ground.