Glenburn Tea Estate (and now Boutique Hotel) has staked out the opposite end of the tea-garden experience. Whereas Makaibari offers A Day in the Life of a Tea Plucker, Glenburn’s luxurious experience is A Day in the Life of a Tea Planter.
It’s also at the other end of the price range. Compared to Makaibari’s Rs 600 a day, an all-inclusive single at Glenburn runs around Rs 18,000 (over $300). All-inclusive means everything from the washing and darning of clothes to a jeep and driver at the disposal of every guest—from pick-up until drop-off. There are four-course meals, riverside picnics, and visits to the tea factory, guided walks with experts on traditional medical plants or birdlife, and hikes down to the 110-year-old Manjitar Suspension Bridge, which dangles one hundred feet above the Rangeet River as it crosses over to Sikkim. The day begins with a light tap on the door and a “bed tea”—a tray of freshly brewed tea and a few biscuits—and ends with sophisticated dishes that use tea and tea leaves as ingredients.
Husna-Tara Prakash was largely responsible for getting the hotel element of Glenburn operating. Raised in England, she attended boarding school in India at the elite Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun, then did her undergraduate and postgraduate work in the natural sciences in England at Cambridge. She married a man whose family owns Glenburn and ended up back in India. Visiting the estate the first time, she saw its potential as a special place to stay. After a major refurbishment, the first four rooms opened in 2002, followed by another four in 2008.
Standing on an upper balcony of the beefy, imposing redbrick Victorian mansion in Kolkata where Glenburn has an office, she explained that the hotel component wasn’t just something else to do along with producing tea. The key, she stressed, was to give the hospitality part of the garden full attention—from a packed picnic hamper with chicken-and-mint sandwiches, apple cake, and hot tea to unwrap at a scenic viewpoint on the long drive up to Glenburn from Bagdogra Airport to specially designed tea-patterned fabrics that decorate the rooms. Though there are only eight of them, they command a staff of fifty—all from Glenburn’s tea families.
The keys to the success of this concept were offering access to Glenburn’s charismatic resident tea planter, manager, tea maker, and snake catcher Sanjay Sharma, and making them feel like personal guests rather than paying clients. That meant showing them around the estate, leading tastings of Glenburn’s range of teas, and offering a glimpse of a planter’s working life. At the day’s end, Sanjay joined them for drinks on the verandah of the sprawling and elegantly refurbished century-old burra bungalow where he could hold court and tell well-honed anecdotes explaining cultural details of the garden or relate his latest snake-catching caper. Like Rajah Banerjee, he is a splendid storyteller, although his anecdotes lack the mystical platitudes so present in Rajah’s. Sanjay’s tend to be light and never preachy, rarely long, and studded with caustic, self-deprecating zingers. He tends to stop at a good line, and the remainder of the story needs to be coaxed from him.
On one muggy summer evening, the guests eventually moved to the large, oval table in the dining room with Sanjay at its head as seasoned host but also head chef. He had developed many of the kitchen’s signature dishes, mostly original takes on international classics (tea-marbled deviled eggs) or European accents on Indian ones. Sanjay’s plat de résistance is succulent tea-smoked chicken breasts served on a bed of wilted spinach leaves and moistened with a tea jus aromatized by star anise, cinnamon, bay leaves, and peppercorns. While somewhat inspired by episodes of MasterChef Australia he catches on YouTube, it is also influenced by Sanjay’s mother, who comes from the far-northeastern Indian region bordering Burma called Nagaland, where slow-smoking is an important way of preserving. The dinner finished with Glenburn’s “chai dessert,” a thick “tea” spiced with cinnamon, ginger, bay leaf, nutmeg, and vanilla seeds scraped from a leathery pod with the tip of a sharp knife and whisked as it comes to a boil to give it the consistency of a frothy cappuccino.
Glenburn is rated number one out of all of the TripAdvisor hotels listed in Darjeeling, and it’s generally booked solid. “We also make tea,” Sanjay sarcastically quipped, spooning up the last of his dessert. The guests laughed. Had Glenburn not been producing some of the finest teas in Darjeeling, it wouldn’t have been funny.*
Tourism, however, remains at the mercy of politics, as was demonstrated even before 2013’s monsoon had cleared.
After the beginning of a staggeringly good tourist season, the GJM called a strictly enforced bandh on the last day of July that shut down the hills. A month later, an Indian newspaper reported, “The unusually deserted look of the popular mall road of Darjeeling is a testimony to [its effect on tourism]. Only two of the about seven hundred hotels are partially operating, where media persons are the only inhabitants.”6
The bandh was rescinded the day after the piece ran, but the damage for the busy autumn festival season ahead had already been done. Peak tourist season in the hills is during the Puja and Diwali holidays of late October and early November. Most visitors had already canceled.
KANCHENJUNGHA IN VIEW, NO VIEWERS read a newspaper headline of the famously elusive mountain obscured by clouds much of the year. “The glistening white Kanchenjungha under an azure [sky] was in view today but there was hardly any tourist to marvel it,” the piece opened. “Chowrastha, Darjeeling’s famous promenade that is chock full in the Puja season, was deserted—the ripple effect of nearly a month of agitation that has kept visitors away.”7
Such lack of stability is also keeping investors away from larger tea-tourism projects and potentially scuttling, or at least delaying, those in the making. Perhaps that isn’t fully a bad thing. “We also make tea” would be an unfortunate and unworthy tagline for Darjeeling.
Cows, joint councils, and planters’ bungalows redone as boutique hotels may all prove to be stopgaps as much as trucking in day labor for absentee workers, measures that merely delay, or soften, the playing out of Darjeeling’s labor endgame. The solution needs to be far more radical—perhaps something along the lines that Rajah Banerjee floated a decade ago. While he has been at the forefront of many of the area’s most significant movements that eventually found a wide following from other gardens, this potential scheme could be the one that no one would dare implement.
“Nobody wants to be a farmer anywhere,” he said in the 2005 documentary on Makaibari. “But there’s a solution. The only way out. If it’s your cow, you’re going to look after it very well. If it’s your own farm, you’re going to look after it very well.” It’s about motivation through partnership, though this time through ownership. “In ten years’ time, the lands of Makaibari will be distributed to the 550 householders in Makaibari, to the ladies only, as stakeholders. The land goes back to the people. As opposed to the land that was taken away from the people in my great-grandfather’s epoch.”8
He reiterated the idea around the same time, telling Outlook agazine, “In about ten years’ time, I want to parcel out the entire tea garden area (except the forests) to the workers. After all, they’re the rightful owners of this land since they’ve worked on it for generations. I’ll purchase the tea leaves and run the factory.”9
“Maybe it’s utopian, it’s idealistic,” he said in the documentary, “but that’s the way I feel now.” He smiled widely on-screen, like an amazed child. “The colonial style of hierarchical management is over.”10