In his bungalow’s sitting room Rajah proclaimed, “The creature who wins against nature destroys itself.”*
Farming isn’t a battle against nature, but a partnership with it. It is respecting the basics of nature in action and ensuring that they continue.
We do not live nor farm in a void. There is a “connection between our environment and our way of life,” wrote Prime. “A way of life does not exist in a vacuum. It is based on a way of thinking: a philosophy of life.”28
Over a cup of freshly processed first flush tea, Rajah said, “When you eat or drink something, it becomes a material part of your being.”
* In August 2014, Ambootia’s factory, built in 1920 and completely updated and modernized in 2009, burnt to the ground. The fire started around nine P.M., quickly engulfed the building, and by the time the fire brigade made it from Kurseong, all was lost. Plucking resumed the following day while the embers still smoldered. Until the new factory can be rebuilt, the green leaves will be processed at one of the group’s other gardens. After the factory at Monteviot burned down in 2004, the same year it was acquired by Ambootia, its green leaf was sent to Ambootia. Now, with Ambootia’s, it will get trucked to Moondakotee and Nagri tea estates for processing until the factory can be rebuilt.
* This echoes a line by the celebrated American environmental campaigner Rachel Carson: “Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
CHAPTER 18
Initiatives
For Darjeeling tea to keep its position on the top shelf of the world’s most distinguished products—or even, perhaps, for it to merely survive—the industry must go beyond simply turning 100 percent organic, offering new varieties of teas, opening new markets, or interesting more tea drinkers within India. The challenge is less in the soil, bushes, or leaves themselves than with the people who reside on the estates. A tea garden needs to be not just a sustainable, self-sufficient farm, but a sustainable, self-sufficient community. It’s not merely about creating well-made teas but also having a stable workforce. While Darjeeling’s celebrated flavor stems from leaves, its future rests in the people who pluck them. If you can’t get the leaves off the bush and processed, everything else becomes irrelevant.
The rapid rise of staggeringly high worker absenteeism in the last few years has moved this to the forefront of urgent threats. Of the major hurdles ahead, the gardens can—and need to—be proactive in immediately tackling this one.
“We know where they are going,” said Sanjay Sharma about Glenburn’s disappearing workforce, whose absenteeism has suddenly and swiftly climbed to around 30 percent. “We have to head off and head back workers. The only way is being able to offer them better employment, better quality of life. It’s a hard one. It’s easier said than done.”
To put the critical challenge in the simplest of terms: the future of Darjeeling depends on motivating a marginalized, low-paid labor force to continue working on the estates. This is particularly challenging when a single kilo of tea can sell for more than they make in the entire year, an especially stark notion at blue-chip gardens. Makaibari might get record prices, but workers receive the same daily wages as on every other garden in the district.
Tea gardens are based on a Raj-era system that remains largely in place. “The colonial foundation is not working,” Rajah Banerjee said in autumn. “It’s broken.” A fundamental change in the serflike structure needs to evolve, to include more worker involvement, even ownership, to make them a dynamic, integrated part of the estate—and a party to its successes. “We need to look out an alternative window,” he said.
“It’s about partnership, not ownership,” insists Rajah. He refuses to call those who work on Makaibari laborers or even workers and instead refers to them as community activists or participants. This isn’t only about semantics, but, rather, deeply invested involvement. “They are not workers but a community. It’s their home. The key is in community participation.”
The 1991 creation of the Makaibari Joint Body (MBJB) was one initiative to encourage this. The committee, comprised of elected members from the estate’s seven villages, is mostly women. Elections take place every three years; the only permanent member is Rajah. The committee makes decisions about the garden and on microloans for projects such as homestay constructions. It runs a nursery and, in 2012, opened a small library with books to lend and Wi-Fi-connected computers to use. While three of the four computers were not working by autumn 2013, it was still offering free computer lessons to people on Makaibari. Even with class sizes of twenty, the continual waiting list reflects the program’s popularity.
Sometimes partnership comes in subtle forms. “Encouragement is partnership,” Rajah said one cold night in the spacious drawing room of the Makaibari bungalow. “Empowerment is partnership. What do marginalized women that have been empowered invest in?” He mimed jiggling an old-fashioned waist belt heavy with coins. “They invest in the best primary education. That creates awareness.” As he spoke, he made slow loops around the room. “Then they invest in the best secondary school. This builds capacity.” He stopped for a moment near his wife, Srirupa, who huddled close to an electric heater that reflected glowing orange in the lenses of her eyeglasses. “With awareness and capacity you create character, and if you have character, you can succeed at anything.” He smiled, then said emphatically, “That’s what you get when you empower the ladies!”
Estates across Darjeeling are trying various initiatives that range from reforesting—giving out varieties of trees, including bamboo, which has a multitude of uses—to harvesting rainwater and buying vehicles to ply the roads as taxis. But the ancient cow has been the base for the most inspired schemes.
“A thoroughly healthy farm should be able to produce within itself all that it needs,” Rudolf Steiner stated in his second agricultural lecture.1 At the center of the farm and its health is the cow, both in traditional Vedic practice as well as in organic and biodynamic farming.
The cow has long been sacred in India, valued but also protected. In ancient India, killing one was a serious crime tantamount to killing a Brahman and punishable by death.2 The animal has an elemental motherliness, with its milk replacing that of a baby’s mother. Cows can convert grasses and roughage that are inedible and indigestible to humans into milk, which in turn can become butter and ghee (clarified butter), yogurt, and cheese, excellent sources of protein but also some of the most important offerings for the gods. The cow was also key to rural life by providing manure for fertilizer as well as fuel. Their leather could be used for sandals, garments, and receptacles, and they could be trained to pull plows and carts.3 As a large poster hanging in Ambootia’s tasting room titled “The Cow Story” illustrates, it was the most useful of all domesticated animals.
The cow’s importance remains so on many of Darjeeling’s tea estates, especially as the number of organic gardens has dramatically increased in the last decade. Gardens generally do not own the cows; rather, they belong to those living in the estate’s villages, who sell the manure for organic fertilizer to the garden while keeping the milk to drink or to sell at the market.