Always a pioneer, Rajah went a step further in utilizing cow dung on Makaibari decades ago. Inspired by Gandhi’s notion of swadeshi—self-sufficiency or self-reliance—Rajah used a component from the Mahatma’s bucolic vision and offered a way to turn the dung into a clean and renewable fuel. Biogas is created from a slurry of cow manure and water via anaerobic digestion. The organic matter breaks down in a biogas plant (also called a digester), and a hood traps the methane created. This can be stored and then burned as fuel, generally for cooking.
One of the biggest advantages of biogas is that it reduces the need to cut firewood from the surrounding hillsides to use for cooking fuel. Cutting fewer trees shores up the soil of Darjeeling’s fragile hillsides against erosion, slows the spread of deforestation, and helps stop landslides that claw away at the slopes. In additon, homes become healthier by the cutting of smoke from the kitchens, and this can improve the quality of life—and often the economic circumstances of the family. Collecting firewood was considered a woman’s job, and for many women was their single most time-consuming task, taking three or more hours a day. Being free of this provides a significant amount of time to dedicate to other pursuits, including ones that generate income. It created what Rajah calls “grassroots entrepreneurs,” who began selling their organic milk, planting and tending patches of vegetables (to eat at home or sell in the market), making paper, brewing millet wine, and opening homestays. This “income away from tea,” as he calls it, complements a household’s wages from the estate.
Such dynamic programs on Makaibari have not been without missteps. Rajah’s first foray into biogas used a community-size unit that failed within months. He revisited the idea in spring of 1988 with individual digesters. With people more personally responsible, it worked better. But visits throughout the 2013 harvest to Makaibari showed few signs of cows, and the hoods of all seven biogas digesters in Upper Makaibari were cracked and out of use.
“Maintenance is always a problem,” agreed a small group of men living in different villages around the estate. They spoke of having cows a handful of years ago—“in the years of biogas.” One said, “But it was too much work cutting grass for them.” It was easier in the beginning when they could find fodder closer. One of the men, who lives in Upper Makaibari near the factory, estimated that his village had just four or five cows, with perhaps forty to fifty in all of Makaibari. And not from any garden program. “Bought with their own money,” he said. They sell the cow dung to the garden.
While Rajah’s bucolic biogas dream remains unrealized, most homes now have gas stoves that run on propane cylinders bought in the small shops around the garden. Cooking with wood, though, has not disappeared. Gas is expensive and generally reserved for the midday meal, when time is limited. Most families still use wood to cook morning and evening meals. To warm their homes on winter evenings, they burn tea-garden prunings. No one, the men said, has heating.
Still, Rajah offers what he has done on Makaibari as a framework. “We’ve been part of creating something that could bring dynamic change,” he said in his office. “It has turned into a movement.” He was referring not only to the natural methods of farming, but also something deeper. “When you come into Makaibari, you feel a part of it.”
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Darjeeling is a favorite for visitors, and recent spells of political stability have seen numbers in town shoot up with both Indian and foreign guests. The 2010–11 season saw 135,000 domestic tourists. That number climbed to 430,000 for 2011–12 and to 730,000 for 2012–13.4
Often affectionately calling the city Darj, Indian visitors stroll the Chowrasta (and let their kids be led around it on scruffy ponies), browse the vintage photos in Das Studio, and sit on Keventer’s roof terrace, where, in Anurag Basu’s 2012 Bollywood blockbuster Barfi!, Ranbir Kapoor unsuccessfully proposed to Ileana D’Cruz, then climbed the nearby clock tower to turn back the time fifteen minutes, as if it had never happened. Families jam the Hasty Tasty for familiar Indian dishes, buy knitted woolen hats with tassels in the bazaar for the cold evenings, and pick up packets of tea at Nathmulls to take home as gifts.
Darjeeling’s tea and tea gardens are clearly a draw, the gardens’ lazy carpeting of green across the area a scenic attraction. But tea tourism is one initiative that remains largely untested, yet is full of promise. While West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, is keen on the concept, complaints remain about the convoluted nature of converting land from agricultural to tourism use. The gardens, who lease their land from the state government, can only transform a mere fraction of their estates to dedicated tourism usage: just five acres (two hectares), with actual construction limited to a single acre (the remaining four acres are for landscaping and beautifying the property).5
So far, just a handful of gardens have tapped into the concept and allowed people to be guests on a working estate. Each has taken a different approach.
To offer some of the many visitors who turn up at Makaibari a place to stay, the estate instigated a homestay program in 2005. According to Nayan Lama, its young coordinator, twenty-two families are engaged in the program, fifteen in the village near the factory and another seven in Phoolbari (Flower Village), on the lower reaches of Makaibari. Using microloans from the Makaibari Joint Body, each host family has constructed a separate room for guests and an outdoor Western-style toilet. For Rs 600 (about $10) per person, visitors get a room, three meals, visits to the tea fields and factory, tastings, and plenty of tea to drink. Primarily European and North American college-age students are attracted, but Indian tourists have begun staying, too. While accommodations can be rustic at best and susceptible to power outages and water shortages, the opportunity to experience a tea estate at ground level is unique and especially tantalizing at one as well-known and innovative as Makaibari.
“Should you plan to interact positively with our working philosophy and get the true pulse and insouciance of the Makaibari spirit,” Rajah Banerjee replied after an initial inquiry, “then a homestay with one of our community members is recommended.”
The money for these, Rajah likes to point out, “goes to the woman of the house.” Clearly he trusts women more than men with fiscal diligence. While he helped get it off the ground, “now it runs itself,” he said proudly. “I don’t keep a penny.”
One of the families involved is that of Maya Davi Chettrini, the first female field supervisor, and her husband, a stocky forest ranger who helps guard the estate’s woodlands. The guest room is painted ocher red and lime green and has a pair of beds, a tall stack of soft blankets, and views down over the tea-covered valley. Dinner in the front room one spring night included dal and a tangy stewed-chicken dish with plenty of aromatic long-grain white rice, which was eaten by candlelight during an hours-long electrical outage.
Homestay mornings start not long after sunrise, with the chickens crowing and general movement among the small but dense village of Upper Makaibari. A typical breakfast includes a masala omelet (with minced tomatoes, onions, and green chilies from one of the pots alongside the house), aloo dum (spicy potatoes) dabbed with heady mango pickle, and plenty of freshly fried parathas (unleavened bread).
While guests have a second cup of Makaibari tea from an ample thermos and begin planning out their day on the garden, Maya shoulders a small cloth carryall with a bottle of water, takes from a hook outside the door her red umbrella, bleached and tattered by the elements, and heads to the fields to work.