“I was seeking the flavor in the balance sheet of life,” he said, repeating one of his favorite phrases.
• • •
Rajah’s father, Pasupati Nath (P. N.) Banerjee, possessed a deep passion for hunting—and a notoriously accurate shot. Both are evident in the airy sitting room of the Makaibari bungalow. Surrounding a photograph of P. N. standing erect in his Sam Browne belt and wide-brimmed hat is a dusty menagerie of stuffed trophies: tigers squatting nonchalantly on their haunches with yawning, fang-filled mouths; a matching pair of stuffed leopards and the skin of a third stretching across a wall; a heavy rack of deer antlers. The opaque, amber-colored eyes of an enormous buffalo head mounted on the wall gaze out over the room.
Hunting in the estate’s forests one day as a young man, not long after taking over from his father, P. N. was engulfed in a sudden seasonal rainstorm. Waiting it out at the edge of the forest, he noticed that water running off the planted sections of the garden was murky with sediment. The estate’s wealth—its nutrient-rich topsoil—was being washed away in the rain. Yet rivulets of water flowing out of the woods ran clear. Seeing how the fallen leaves from the trees offered a barrier that was preventing erosion, he realized the need for a similar solution for the tea bushes.5
He began searching, and in 1945 workers started mulching. They spread loppings and cuttings from various grasses and plants on the estate like an insulating blanket across the ground between the bases of bushes.
Mulching accomplishes numerous things. It absorbs the area’s heavy rain, from the short, powerful bursts before the monsoon through the steady downpours during the rainy season itself. This prevents soil erosion as well, helping the moisture to be absorbed into the earth rather than just running off it. The mulch layer protects the soil against evaporation during the dry season and periods of drought. Underneath, the loamy earth is rich in humus and decomposition. Mulching also prevents weeds by depriving them of light and acts as a gentle buffer between soil and air, allowing earthworms to flourish and work in the topmost layer of soil, churning and better aerating the earth. And it helps build topsoil.
Something more profound was going on here, too, Rajah explained. “With the mulching, the tea became part of the woodlands.”
This was the first step in Makaibari’s organic journey. However, P. N. continued to use chemical applications. Later, Rajah worried that the spraying was killing the rich organisms that were flourishing from the mulching and even giving animals insecticide poisoning. While Rajah was keen to stop the practice, his father was still in charge of Makaibari. Workers called P. N. burra sahib, big boss, and Rajah chota sahib, little boss. (Most of those living in Makaibari’s villages still refer to him as chota sahib, at least when talking about him. It is used on the garden not unaffectionately.)
In a hidden corner of the estate, on a steep slope of tea among a heavily wooded section that was rarely visited, even by his father, Rajah and two of Makaibari’s most senior workers secretly tended a patch of bushes. Manuring at night, it took the men nearly a month to carry organic compost from a nearby village on Makaibari and spread it around the site. Rajah was able to have the tea plucked and processed apart, and as he tells it in his book, his father frequently commented on the exceptional quality of the leaves during the batch tastings, probing the production manager for their specific source. Rajah managed to kept the secret for the whole harvest year before finally revealing his stealthy, organic undertaking.6
Once party to the subterfuge and having tasted the difference, P. N. supported his son’s idea. P. N. provided cows for manure, workers learned composting techniques, and the estate began converting away from chemical applications.
But the end of using chemicals wouldn’t come until Rajah took over Makaibari. In the early 1980s, India’s tea industry struggled severely. National taxes and labor costs rose sharply, exports to the UK plummeted, and Kenyan and Sri Lankan teas offered stiff competition on the global market. Prices dropped. Profit margins dwindled. Dozens of estates in Darjeeling were abandoned; the remainder strained to survive. Rajah’s father retired to Calcutta and thrust the running of the garden onto his son. The chota sahib had nothing to lose and launched fully into realizing his organic vision. Rajah doesn’t see it that way, though, and bristles at the notion. “I didn’t take over anything. How can you take over change? I was merely a conduit,” he insists.
Occupying one end of the upper floor of a small, two-story building fronting the factory with its green roof and corrugated, silver siding, Rajah’s office has a worn, green-and-white-patterned carpet and pale yellow walls, a pair of frayed wicker chairs, and a large desk covered with a leather mat and stacks of papers. A long, glass-fronted bookcase runs across one end of the room. Trophies, awards, and plaques crowd its top; inside, shelves overflow with books on birds and animals, generators and income-tax law, and tomes such as Will Durant’s The Age of Louis XIV and The Life of Greece. The doors to a small terrace are always thrown open to the hum of the factory and the smell of freshly fired tea. A shankha, a large conch shell associated with Hinduism, sits in a corner.
The path to organic farming began with his father, and Rajah, he finally conceded, continued to drive it forward. “I was on a mission. It was a process of slowly moving. We moved ahead a little each day.”
For buyers and consumers, being an organic farm means being a certified one. The idea for Makaibari’s getting certification was instigated by a chance meeting in 1987 with Kiran Tawadey, an elegant woman who owns Hampstead Tea, a brand of organic and Fairtrade teas that gets exported to seventeen countries. “She said, ‘There’s big bucks in it,’ but I told her, ‘I’m not in it for the bucks,’” Rajah explained.
Tawadey, then in her late twenties and just starting out in the business, was not easily dissuaded. She began introducing Rajah to the broader organic community and asked him to host an inspector on the estate. He agreed. (Why? “I can’t say no to anybody.”)
Makaibari convincingly satisfied the criteria during the inspection, and in 1988 Makaibari was duly certified organic, the first tea estate in India to be so. Rajah is deeply proud of it, although he tends to underplay it. “I became certified because a buyer wanted it,” he said in a deadpan tone.
The transition to organic was not an easy time. “All my neighbors thought I was some sort of a witch, doing witchcraft in tea, and stayed away from it, from the crazy man,” he explained in the Makaibari documentary. “It was very, very lonely the first few years.”7 Organic isolation didn’t last long. “The moment the whole garden started prospering, proving the point that eco-agriculture could be economically viable, everybody has started jumping in the bandwagon,” he said with a jaunty, upward lilt to in his voice.8 When Makaibari started achieving record prices, the bandwagon became even more popular. “I was astonishingly propelled from laughingstock to pioneer,” he wrote in his book.9
What a change in a quarter century. According to the Darjeeling Tea Association, by the end of the 2013 harvest, fifty-eight of Darjeeling’s tea gardens—an astonishing two-thirds—were certified organic with a number more in the conversion.*