It’s Tea Time

Everything looks calm and quiet on the surface, the undulating plains of Assam covered in lush green groves of tea bushes spread into the horizon, punctured here and there by shade trees. The air hangs heavy with moisture and heat, a perfect setting to grow and nurture the perfect cup of tea. Let’s move on to another frame of time, it’s the mid-19th century, a perfect evening in the British colonial plantation bungalow somewhere in North East India.

The plantation owner sips his piping hot evening tea, gazing towards his vast acreage of plantation estate acquired at highly favourable terms from the colonial government. Thus, begins the story of the leaf which would change the destiny of this quiet corner of the sub-continent plunging it into a trajectory of events from which there would be no turning back.

It all started around 1598, this insignificant bush finds its first mention, alongside numerous exotic products of the East, in the note of the Dutch traveller Jan Huyghen Van Linschoten, who had been exploring the Eastern lands. In the coming centuries, tea would reach England through the British royals. The royal inspiration for the brew came in 1662 when Catherine of Braganza, daughter of Portugal’s King John IV, married England’s newly restored monarch, King Charles II and carried to the English court her liking for this“new brew from the East”. 

Initially taking root as a luxury item among the English elite, gradually tea would trickle down to the masses. But where did this leaf come from and how was it procured. It is this basic question which would guide global trade politics of the largest multi-national company of the 18th century – The British East India Company, in the process it would also give birth to the first tea plantations in the sub-continent.

Trade in exotica from the East had evolved from 1500 onwards as a monopoly trade of the various European trading Companies. By the 1800’s this trade was dominated by the British East India Company. Alongside the growing fame of tea in England, the fortunes of the British East India Company as a global trader in Eastern spices and exotica grew. However, procuring the leaf from the farthest corners of Asia was not a simple matter of exchange. China, the only tea grower of the time, had no demand for anything that the British had to provide. 

This caused a disastrous trade imbalance in the form of a huge drain of silver from the British, who had to pay for their precious beverage in raw bullion. This was the case until Opium came to the rescue.

Opium was grown and processed in the British colony of India. It was Indian opium that would eventually be employed to pay for the British cup of afternoon tea. The trajectory of this tale now becomes more complex. On the one side of the globe, the British currency of opium would induce the major chunk of Chinese population into an opioid daze. This country-wide addiction would soon be declared a national evil and would be the major cause of the two devastating opium Wars that would humiliate China into opening-up their markets to foreign trade. A humiliation which bears an imprint even today. On the other hand, the heady blend of sugar and tea would lead the British further into another colonial spree of enslavement and exploitation in the islands of the Caribbean on an entirely new level.

Meanwhile, with the Chinese government taking serious measures to curb opium use and ban its trade, the British need an alternative which can pitch in to fulfil the growing demand for Chinese tea. With the growing regulations and sanctions pertaining to the opium trade with China, several British surveyors and officials started dabbling with the idea of growing the leaf within the British domains of the sub-continent. The focus now shifts to 
the newly acquired North-Eastern marches of the Indian Empire which had only recently been usurped from the Burmese during the Anglo-Burmese War.

It is the 1830’s: After intense scouting and sampling of seeds, locations and climes suitable for growing the leaf in the sub-continent, the first plantations were established in the plains of Upper Assam. Enterprising Brits and Scots were granted huge estates of virgin forest land at minimal cost in return for clearing the wild and establishing tea plantations. Tea plantations would soon coat the landscape of Brahmaputra valley establishing growing plantation economy. This sparsely populated corner of the Raj, however, has a very low population density and labourers needed to man and manage the various processes of tea plantations are far and few. 

Thus, begins a new phase of enslavement by the British. Garbed as coolies/indentured labour (the British had decided to abolish slavery a long time back) slaves are imported in huge numbers from the drought and famine-stricken areas of Eastern India, to be dumped on the huge tea-plantations of Assam. Living under squalid conditions and working under inhumane work regimes, is what defines the existence of these slave labourers brought in to process the perfect cup of English tea.

This is the story of how an insignificant bush growing in the wild, took root in a quaint little corner of the subcontinent’s North-East, gradually spreading to its other parts; creating a different blend wherever it went. A leaf which would outlive the colonial masters who nurtured it for their need and greed. This is the story of turmoil which brews beneath that steaming cup of tea in your hand, a cup of the past which gets more interesting the deeper you dive into it.

The author is an academic specialising in Indian medieval history