Longevity is a Darjeeling trait. Rajah Banerjee was born on Makaibari and has been working on the estate since 1970. Namring’s Chaudhary has been here in the hills for forty-four years and Singbulli’s Satish Mantri for twenty-nine. Both men are among a number of Rajasthani planters. Chaudhary’s brother is the manager of Lingia. Dhancholia at Marybong is also from Rajasthan, as is Rajesh Pareek on Tukvar. These men arrived in the green of the hills and never left, gaining an intimate knowledge of their garden in order to obtain the finest results from its unique set of materials and microclimate.
B. N. Mudgal personifies this ideal in his twenty-three years on Jungpana and in the isolated nature of the garden to the east of Kurseong. After a bouncing ride down a windy, rough dirt track through Goomtee Tea Estate, the road ends abruptly at a river. A wooden footbridge, slick on misty monsoon mornings, arcs over the tumbling runoff, and a trail heads up 638 uneven, slippery steps embedded in the hillside to the Jungpana factory and offices. The altitude change and climb leave an unaccustomed visitor’s legs rubbery and heart palpitating, sweaty from the hike and the humidity but chilled by the high-elevation breezes.
Everything needs to be carried in by foot, including machinery parts and fuel for the factory as well as well as rice, atta flour, and other food staples. All of the tea is carried out. Every other day, men load wooden chests of tea on their backs, with a wide, steadying trump-line stretched across the forehead, and head down the hill.
For the first decade after independence, the Nepalese royal Rana family owned Jungpana before selling it to its current owners, the Kejriwals, in 1956. The estate’s name comes from a legend of a Gorkha called Jung Bahadur, who was mauled by a leopard while hunting with a British sahib. The hunter carried Jung, calling out for pana (water), to a stream, where he died. Ever since, the area has been known as the place where Jung took his last drink. “We don’t know the facts, but that’s what the elderly people on the garden tell us,” said Mudgal.
The south-facing garden is small, having just 73.6 hectares (182 acres) under tea, and spans from 2,900 to 3,300 feet, with a significantly higher-up out section called Mahalderam that ranges from 5,642 to 6,001 feet. The plucked leaves from those fields are loaded into gunnysacks and slid down a steel cable to the factory to be processed—nearly three miles and a three-thousand-foot drop in just six minutes.
Jungpana produces only about 36,000 kilograms (80,000 pounds) of tea a year, a limited but consistently excellent output that is much sought after by clients that include Harrods and Fortnum & Mason in the UK, Mariage Frères and Fauchon in France, and the royal family in Japan. Many experts are calling it Darjeeling’s top producer. Once the 2013 season wrapped up, the front page of the Calcutta Telegraph proclaimed a new champ takes darjeeling cup.20 Jungpana had knocked Castleton off its perch as the area’s finest tea, the article argued. In the 2014 World Tea Championships held in the USA, Jungpana won the award for top Darjeeling tea.
Wholesale buyers seemed to agree with such judgment. In 2013, from April through the second week of November, the average price Jungpana’s tea fetched at auction was Rs 856.33 per kilogram, far more than the next one, Castleton, which went for a third less at Rs 569.15.21
Darjeeling’s best tea? “Each tea needs to be approached with an appreciation of its peculiarities and individual characteristics. You really can’t compare between a Rembrandt and a Picasso. If my pockets are deep enough, I would buy them all!” Krishan Katyal, the chairman and managing director of J. Thomas & Co. in Kolkata, is quoted as saying in the Telegraph article.
Sanjay Sharma embodies the unsettled young man who ends up in the hills on a tea estate as randomly as his British predecessors, finds a passion when he begins interacting with the leaves, and creates something special.
Still in his early forties, he’s young and confident, exceedingly sharp, with both handyman cleverness and book smarts, and, although somewhat wild as a young man, is no rogue. Or at least not completely. His father was one of India’s most decorated fighter pilots, an expert on MiGs—he helped bring over the first planes from Russia—who fought in the 1971 war with Pakistan and, for three years, was head flight instructor at the Air Force Academy. He met Sanjay’s mother, a nurse, while recuperating in a hospital after a faulty ejection from a jet. Sanjay was educated at St. Mary’s High School, an Irish Christian Brothers boarding school in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, and then La Martinière College in Lucknow, finishing at a precocious fifteen. After two years studying at a medical college in Patna, Bihar, he realized the field didn’t fully interest him and, at eighteen, transferred to the elite St. Stephens College in Delhi to study literature. Casting about for something to do after graduation, Sanjay landed an interview with a large international tea company that controlled numerous estates.
Of tea he knew almost nothing. The company was looking for OLQ, Sanjay explained using Indian air force jargon, “officer-like qualities.” As in the recruitment ideals at J. Thomas & Co., they were seeking sportsmen. Bright and energetic, he had the ability to lead and the drive to win. They hired him and sent him to work on their Soom Tea Estate.
Sanjay immediately took to the isolated life in the hills, a turn that surprised his friends and fellow Stephanians, who were getting rich in the media and financial worlds, writing books, or entering politics, while he worked as a modest assistant on a tea garden. “As a new assistant manager, you basically know nothing,” he said, walking up through the nursery. Fields of tea rose all around. The morning light caught dozens of greenish spiderwebs strung between tall shade trees that held palm-size golden orb-weavers with striped, yellow-jointed legs. “Technically you’re an executive, but even the lowest-paid worker on the estate knows more about tea than you do.” He watched and listened carefully—he quickly picked up the local language—and was lucky to have had a good head worker who taught him much. Stopping at a covered mound of composted earth, he took a handful and breathed in the humus and loam. “As a planter,” he said, “you have to love the smell of soil.”
In 2001, at twenty-eight years old—the youngest in modern Darjeeling history— Sanjay was named manager of Glenburn when the garden was taken over by new owners. “I jumped the queue,” he quipped, adding with a laugh that this didn’t endear him to many at the Planters’ Club. Sanjay has a deep and infectious enthusiasm for what he does, and a sense of pride that permeates his undertakings. No matter if he has been up into the late hours of the night, he rises early to check on the factory. He is energetic but has a calm presence and uses a quick and gentle wit to diffuse moments rather than his voice. Things get quietly done. He carries complete authority on the garden, but out of respect rather than fear, and appears extremely well liked by the Gorkhas, with whom he banters in their own language.
“Tea planting, as a profession, is unrivaled in the varied interests it involves,” wrote tea historian William Ukers in the 1930s, “but its greatest attraction lies in the fact that it appeals to the creative instinct in man.”22 That appeal remains. Tea planting, Sanjay said, “is unrivaled in scope for creativity. It’s endless.”
For him, there is creativity in dealing with a thousand full-time workers and all the elements that come with running a 758-hectare (1,873-acre) estate with eight villages housing 708 families and some 5,000 people. There is creativity in the field, getting the bushes to produce the best leaves they can, and in the factory, eking out the finest possible teas from them.