Initial British attempts to cultivate tea in India were something of a shambles. The committee decided that the Assamese climate would be suitable for an experiment in tea cultivation but they did not believe that the indigenous plant which Bruce and Charlton had seen growing there was suitable for tea production. G. J. Gordon was therefore dispatched to China to collect seedlings and to recruit Chinese who knew how to make tea. Although Europeans had been eagerly buying tea from the Chinese for over two centuries, they were still uncertain as to the precise production methods. These were secrets that the Chinese guarded jealously. It was extremely difficult to gain access to the tea manufactories and the Chinese would chase, and attempt to capture, any ship they suspected of smuggling out plants or seeds.26 Gordon must have been a resourceful man as he duly sent back 80,000 tea plants in 1835, and two Chinese tea producers a couple of years later.27 Their advice was much needed as the motley crew of Chinese carpenters and shoemakers living in the bazaars of Calcutta who had been sent to Assam as advisers ‘had never seen a tea plant in their lifetime’ and had no idea how to pluck or treat the leaves. The Assamese, whose land had been requisitioned to create tea gardens, refused to work in tea cultivation, and to make matters worse, the Chinese tea plants failed to thrive. By the time the British had decided that the indigenous Assamese tea plants were in fact perfectly good for making tea, these had interbred with the Chinese plants, resulting in an inferior hybrid.28
Despite all these problems, the tea growers of Assam managed to produce twelve chests of tea in 1838. These were auctioned in London the following year to very little acclaim.29 Old, hard leaves which had been over-plucked, and then transported long distances before being processed, made poor-quality tea. Initially, Assam tea was so inferior it could barely compete with even the worst grades from China. Nevertheless, the company handed over its plantations to the newly founded Assam Tea Company in 1840, though it was not until 1853 that Assam tea paid its first dividend.30 In 1861, tea mania struck and retired army officers, doctors, engineers, steamer captains, shopkeepers, policemen, clerks, even civil servants with stable positions, scrambled to buy tea plantations or to get work as planters. These enthusiastic novices bought up and cleared unsuitable land and planted it out with tea. In 1865, they realised they would never make a profit, and the tea-mania businessmen sold in a panic and prices crashed. Unsurprisingly, the quality of the tea produced the next year was so abysmal that prices fell again and more tea gardens failed. It was not until the 1870s that the tea industry in India stabilised and finally began producing good-quality tea for a profit.31
Among the Indian population, a comparable rush brought even greater misery to India’s poor. Contractors, who became known as ‘Coolie Catchers’, hired desperate peasants as labour for the tea plantations. The first stage of the journey to the gardens on packed and insanitary boats resulted in the deaths of many of the labourers before they reached their destination. Once the survivors arrived, their living conditions were basic, disease was rife, and many of them suffered from enlargement of the spleen, which is a side effect of malaria. This meant that when their employers kicked or beat them (which happened lamentably often) they frequently died from a ruptured spleen. The only medical treatment available came from their medically incompetent employers and a few doctors. Life on the tea plantations was terrible for the workers.32
In 1870, over 90 per cent of the tea drunk in Britain came from China, and the proportion was even higher in most other tea-drinking countries. But the producers of Indian tea were at last ready to challenge the Chinese and, in the 1880s, they began a vigorous global marketing campaign at the various colonial exhibitions. In Britain, the public enthusiastically accepted free samples of cups of Indian tea as well as the teaspoons, which disappeared inside their pockets at an alarming rate. Teapots also had a low survival rate, with only ten out of 180 surviving the London Health Exhibition of 1888. Indian khidmutgars, in colourful uniforms, were employed at the Paris exhibition of 1889 to create an exotic atmosphere, and in America they travelled the country selling tea at state fairs. At the Garden Palace Exhibition in Melbourne in 1880 Indian teas carried off most of the prizes.33 In Australia, the campaign was carried on virtually single-handedly by James Inglis, whose brother was a Calcutta tea merchant. Continental Europeans and Americans were fairly unresponsive, but the British and Australians began to develop a preference for the fermented black teas of India rather than the unfermented green of China.
In Britain and Australia, the working class’s passion for strong black Indian tea was encouraged by inventive wholesalers who found ways of selling Indian tea at cheaper rates than Chinese teas. Thomas Lipton innovatively purchased his tea leaves in bulk, directly from India (and Ceylon where the tea plantations were first established in the 1880s). At his one hundred shops around Britain, he was able to sell tea for about a quarter of the price charged by ordinary grocers. By 1909, tea was associated in British minds with India to such an extent that it was worth Lipton’s while to employ an Indian to stand in front of one of his London cafés as an advertisement. The Indian in question was ‘an undergraduate’, driven through poverty to find whatever employment he could. By 1900, only 10 per cent (and falling) of the tea consumed in Britain came from China while 50 per cent came from India and 33 from Ceylon.34
Although tea was strongly associated with India in British and Australian minds, Indians still did not drink it themselves. In the cities, to be sure, ‘gentlemen as have frequent intercourse with the “Sahib Logue” (English gentry) . . . [had] acquire[d] a taste for this delightful beverage’ and Gandhi acknowledged that a few westernised Indians now drank a cup or two of tea for breakfast. But, he continued, ‘the drinking of tea and coffee by the so-called educated Indians, chiefly due to British rule, may be passed over with the briefest notice’.35 For the majority of the Indian population, tea was far too expensive a foreign habit. All the paraphernalia of tea drinking – teapots, china cups and saucers, sugar bowls and milk jugs – were too costly for most people. Even in Assam, families working in the tea industry would not have drunk tea at home.36 In his survey of the economic products of India, George Watt observed in 1889 that ‘while India has not only challenged but beaten China, during the past 30 years, no progress has been made in teaching the native population of India the value of tea’.37 In 1901, the Indian Tea Association woke up to the fact that their largest market was sitting right on their doorstep and they extended their marketing campaign to the subcontinent. This extraordinary venture, one of the first of its kind in India, used methods which were new to the region, and to advertising in general.
The Tea Association began by employing a superintendent and two ‘smart European travellers’ to visit grocers. Their task was to persuade them to stock more tea on their shelves. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, at a dinner party given by the Maharaja of Udaipur, the Reverend St Clair Weeden was surprised to find himself sitting next to one such ‘traveller’, ‘an amusing Irishman, who had been going about India for the last five years, selling cheap packets of Lipton’s teas, to which the natives are taking very kindly’.38 These salesmen also arranged for the delivery of liquid tea to offices, and in 1903 the committee in charge of tea propaganda in the south noted that they received complaints ‘should there be any failure in the daily supply at the various Government and mercantile offices’.39 Nevertheless, marketing tea in India was a dispiriting project. In 1904, it was reported that even after three years of hard work there was little to indicate ‘the existence of a proper tea market in India’, and every year from 1901 to 1914, there were complaints that ‘increasing the consumption of tea in India is undoubtedly the most difficult branch of the work’.40
During the First World War the campaign began to gain momentum. Tea stalls had been set up at factories, coal mines and cotton mills where thirsty labourers provided a captive market. The war made factory and mill owners more conscious of the need to keep their workers happy, and t
hey were persuaded to allow time off for tea breaks. The Tea Association hoped that ‘having learnt to drink tea at his work [the employee] will take the habit with him to his home, and so accustom his family and friends to tea’. By 1919, the tea canteen was firmly established as ‘an important element in an industrial concern’.41 Thus, tea entered Indian life as an integral part of the modern industrial world that began to encroach on India in the twentieth century.
The railways were another example of the arrival of the industrial world in India, and the Tea Association transformed them into vehicles for global capitalism. They equipped small contractors with kettles and cups and packets of tea and set them to work at the major railway junctions in the Punjab, the North-West Frontier and Bengal. The cry of ‘Chai! Gurram, gurram chai!’ (‘Tea! Hot, hot tea!’) mingled with the shouts of the pani (water) carriers calling out ‘Hindu pani!’, ‘Muslim pani!’.42 Muslim rail passengers were less bothered by the caste restrictions which hindered Hindus from accepting food or even water from anyone of a lower caste, and they took to tea with enthusiasm. Although the European instructors took great care to guide the tea vendors in the correct way of making a cup of tea, they often ignored this advice and made tea their own way, with plenty of milk and lots of sugar. This milky, intensely sweet mixture appealed to north Indians who like buttermilk and yogurt drinks (lassis). It was affordable and went well with the chapattis, spicy dry potatoes and biscuits sold by other station vendors, running alongside the carriage windows as the trains pulled into the station. Eventually, tea stalls at the railway stations catered to communal sensibilities and were divided into Muslim and Hindu sections.43
In the south, the tea marketers had to compete with coffee. Arab traders had begun cultivating small plots of coffee in the western hills by the seventeenth century, and coffee plantations were established in Ceylon in the 1830s. Thus, coffee had a head start on tea. Even today the coffee wallahs begin to outnumber the chai wallahs as trains pass south. But in the 1930s the Tea Association proudly pronounced the railway campaign a success. They congratulated themselves on the fact that ‘a better cup of tea could in general be had at the platform tea stalls than in the first class restaurant cars on the trains’.44 The chai wallah is still the first thing a passenger hears on waking up in a train in northern India as he marches through the carriages, a metal kettle swinging in one hand and glasses in the other, calling out ‘chai-chai-chai’.
Another branch of the campaign set up tea shops in India’s large towns and ports. These tea shops had a satisfactory snowball effect. ‘Immediately the tea shop was established on a selling basis, shops in the neighbourhood – which did not normally sell tea – commenced to do so, and the areas surrounding the tea shops were infested with tea hawkers who undersold our shops to such an extent that finally they had to be closed down.’ This was seen as progress. The only matter for concern was that the tea hawkers tended to flavour the tea with spices. The Indians demonstrated their characteristic tendency to take a new foodstuff and transform it by applying Indian methods of preparation. This was not a problem in itself, but in spiced tea they tended to use fewer tea leaves. For a campaign that counted every cup of tea and every ounce of tea leaf sold this was a move in the wrong direction. ‘Steps are now being taken to have this remedied,’ reported one campaigner. ‘It is in the Cawnpore Mill area where we have found this so-called “spiced tea” . . . and we are now employing our own hawkers in that district who sell well-made liquid tea in direct competition to the unsavoury and badly prepared decoction known as “spiced tea”.’45
Tea shops only reached a certain type of clientele. A series of campaigns therefore set about taking tea directly into the Indian home, particularly to women who would not have visited tea shops. An army of tea demonstrators was employed to march on the large towns and cities. An area of each town was chosen, and for four months the tea campaigners visited every house, street by street, every day at the same time, except on Sundays. ‘As far as possible we aim at brewing the tea inside the house so as to teach the householder the correct method of preparation,’ one demonstrator explained. The campaigners expected to face hostility. Certain Muslim quarters in Lahore remained impervious, but they were surprised to find that ‘even in the more orthodox and conservative places quite a number of households will allow our staff to demonstrate right inside the house’. The ladies would peek from behind purdah screens at the brewing demonstration, held in the courtyard. In very high-class purdah areas, the committee employed lady demonstrators. In rigidly orthodox Hindu towns, the Brahmans ‘quite definitely refused to accept tea from our demonstrators, in spite of their protestations that they and the Sub-Inspectors were just as good Brahmans as themselves’. In Trichonopoly the demonstrators circumvented this problem by persuading the priests at the Srirangam temple to allow them to distribute cups of tea in the temple precincts.
Having established a habit of making tea at the same time every day in many households in the cities, the demonstrators moved out into smaller provincial towns and this is when they met the Nagarathars of Karaikudi, who started this chapter.46 The special unit’s triumph with the Nagarathars is an indication of the extent to which tea drinking was beginning to penetrate urban India. In the Punjab, the older generation began to complain about young people drinking tea rather than the milk or buttermilk which they thought much healthier.47
Syed Rasul left the town of Mirpur (now in Pakistan) in 1930 or 1932: ‘The first time I had a cup of tea was when I came to Bombay. In the village we used to drink only milk, and water. Only if somebody was ill they would give . . . something like a cup of tea – it was like a medicine.’48 Despite the money and effort channelled into the tea-marketing campaigns, some corners of the country were still untouched. To address this the ‘packing factory scheme’ was started in 1931. Lorries, and in Bengal houseboats, were sent to the local markets where ‘thousands of villagers . . . congregate’ where they distributed cups of tea. The demonstrators reported that ‘at first we had to use much persuasion to induce the ryot to accept a cup of tea’. But the cinema performances which accompanied the tea distribution, helped to make it more popular. The women, who were provided with a special enclosure, particularly liked the films. They were observed ‘sharing [their] tea with children of all ages, even infants in arms’. By the end of 1936, Indian villagers had become so accustomed to tea that in one year the demonstrators were able to give away 26 million cups of it with ease.49
During the Second World War, the marketing campaign was temporarily closed down and the Indian Tea Association concentrated their efforts on the army. Special tea vans were set up to supply the troops. Several of these were even sent overseas with Indian troops fighting in the European arena. The vans were equipped with radio sets, gramophone records of Indian songs, and letter writers so that the soldiers could keep in touch with their families at home while simultaneously acquiring the tea-drinking habit. An enthusiastic army officer, who had been a tea planter before the war, wrote to the Tea Association to commend their efforts: ‘During a 3 days march, under trying climatic conditions, [your tea] van served over 10,000 cups of good tea to Officers and other ranks of this Unit. Quite apart from the value of the drink on that and other occasions, which was much appreciated, the propaganda value must be incalculable. Our sepoys are now definitely “tea conscious” and in post-war days this tea-drinking habit will be carried into many villages throughout India.’
Once the Japanese had brought the war close to India, tea vans serviced air-raid protection workers in the cities of Calcutta, Howrah and Madras, and traumatised survivors of the Malayan and Burmese rout were supplied with hot, comforting cups of tea. In Bombay, the tea car dealing with embarking and disembarking troops was able to proselytise tea among the Americans. They ‘regarded tea with considerable suspicion at first . . . [but] on persuasion [they] were induced to take it without milk’.50 Indeed, tea became the British panacea for all ills during the war. The author of a handb
ook on canteens explained in 1941 that ‘Psychologically tea breeds contentment. It is so bound up with fellowship and the home and pleasant memories that its results are also magic.’51
By 1945, even the homeless living on the streets of Calcutta were drinking tea, and the milkman would stop on his rounds to supply them with a drop of milk to add to their tea.52 Nevertheless, the Tea Association was not entirely satisfied. In 1955, the per capita consumption in India was still only about half a pound, compared with nearly ten pounds in Britain. The marketing machine was restarted.53 But it is in the nature of a marketing campaign to argue that people can always drink, or eat, more of its product. In fact, the relentless campaigning of the tea demonstrators, tea shops, railway stalls and military tea vans, had already significantly changed Indian drinking habits. They were so successful at introducing tea into India that at the end of the twentieth century, the Indian population, which had barely touched a drop of tea in 1900, were drinking almost 70 per cent of their huge crop of 715,000 tons per year.54
Tea is now a normal part of everyday life in India. The tea shop is a feature of every city, town and village. Often they are nothing more than ‘a tarpaulin or piece of bamboo matting stretched over four posts . . . [with] a table, a couple of rickety benches and a portable stove with the kettle permanently on’.55 Men gather round, standing or squatting on their haunches, sipping the hot tea. The tiny earthenware cups, in which the drink is served, lie smashed around the stalls. Everybody drinks tea in India nowadays, even the sadhus (holy men), the most orthodox of Brahmans and the very poor, who use it as a way of staving off hunger.56
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