by Jeff Koehler
So this is the story of how Darjeeling came to produce the highest-quality tea leaves anywhere in the world, and how it spiraled into decline by the beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s also about the radical measures being taken to counter the multitude of challenges and save India’s most exclusive and iconic brew. The most revolutionary among them is not based on technological advances or automation but ancient practices grounded in three-thousand-year-old Hindu scriptures.
Tea is more than merely a drink—it’s a soother and an energizer, a marker of time and a measure of it, present at the most quotidian moments of daily life and at the most special. It seeps into life, and sustains it.
And at its source, the world’s most celebrated tea is more than just any crop—it’s the history and politics of India and Britain, the legacy of colonialism, the rise of global commerce and worker aspirations, the perils of climate change, and much, much more, writ large, and brewed into one glorious cup of amber liquid.
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* For general values, Rs 55 equals US$1—the average of the last decade or so. Historic exchange rates are also used. Prices are accurate into 2014.
First Flush
(late February to mid-April)
Brass bells wound with garlands of orange marigolds hang from the entrance arch for the faithful to ring as they enter the tree-filled temple complex atop Observatory Hill. Clean chimes reverberate in the quiet, chilly dawn from Darjeeling’s highest spot. Printed prayer flags in bold, solid colors—red, green, yellow, white, blue—strung on hemp ropes between poles, pillars, and tree trunks stir in the spring breeze. A troop of pale-faced monkeys, whose connection to the holiness of temples means that they are left unmolested, roam and maraud, stealing shoes that have been removed by the faithful while they kneel, pray, and light incense and small clay lamps filled with ghee (clarified butter) to one of a pantheon of gods as morning sunlight gradually slides up the surrounding slopes.
The short, early spring rains have passed, and gleamings of verdant freshness are in the Darjeeling hills. Giant ferns blanket the mountainsides. Pink magnolias and camellias bloom, the first of the pinkish-red rhododendrons.
The tea bushes, stimulated by the moisture after a winter of dormancy, begin to flush new shoots so quickly that they need to be picked every four to five days. As the light filters through the darting clouds, workers pluck the young leaves: slender and lightly serrated, lacquered green in color, sprightly.
The finished tea comes out of the dryer grayish green. Steeped, it produces a pale-gold to almost-green-toned liquor that’s grassy with fresh-cut-field aromas and a floralness in its bouquet, intensely fruity in the mouth, with a hint—no more—of tartness. The season is still cool and breezy in the high hills, and that freshness carries on into the cup.
“First flush is a spring tea,” said Glenburn Tea Estate’s young manager and resident tea maker, Sanjay Sharma, in the garden’s well-lit tasting room. “The cup’s light, it’s bright, it’s fresh, it’s green, it’s brisk,” Sanjay recited in rapid-fire singsong, touching the tips of his fingers with each adjective. “It has that hint of astringency, so that lends a little crispness to the cup, it’s fresh on the palate.”
Standing at the white-tiled counter, he considered the cup he was describing. Looking more like a safari guide than a tea planter, Sanjay wore polished leather Timberland boots with white socks rolled at the calves, khaki shorts, a pressed white polo shirt, and a zipper photo vest with an inch-thick Swiss Army knife snapped into a top pocket. He had a quick grin and ready one-liners, whiskery chin-beard, and an Errol Flynn mustache that gave him a slightly caddish look only somewhat offset by his rimless glasses. His left hand, partly covered with a patchy scar from a childhood cobra bite, fingered the white tasting cup emblazoned with Glenburn’s name in elaborate Victorian cursive. “Also it’s the time when we have all the citrus plants or trees blossoming, so it’s got a very fruity kind of citrusy-ness note to it.” It has, he said, “everything synonymous with springtime.”
Darjeeling tea is “self-drinking,” meaning not only that blending it with another tea is not required—a standard practice among most of the world’s black teas—but also that it doesn’t need milk or sugar or even, because of the slight astringency, lemon. While the bold and brisk black teas from other regions in India are often prepared as sweet, milky masala chai, spiced by ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon, and slurped scalding hot from a glass held nimbly between thumb and middle finger, Darjeeling’s flavors are delicate, easily buried by such additions, and washed out by more than a few drops of milk.
First flush teas are the most delicate Darjeelings of all.
Commanding top prices, they are highly anticipated by aficionados, especially in Europe, where certain boutiques and tea rooms celebrate their arrival with pomp generally given over to Beaujolais wine. DARJEELING NOUVEAU announces a round sign in the window of the legendary Parisian maison de thé, Mariage Frères, and in a banner across the top of its Web site, of the year’s first offerings. “Arrivage spécial par avion,” it says, Grands Crus and Première Récolte from a highly selective choice of gardens: “Aloobari, Happy Valley, Ambootia, Namring, Castleton, North Tukvar, Nurbong, Bloomfield, Moondakotee.” This is akin to listing Bordeaux’s most prestigious châteaux.
Sanjay took a sip and yielded to the tea’s gentle, composed embrace in silence.
“Springtime in a teacup,” he calls it.
CHAPTER 1
Into the Hills
Darjeeling is isolated. Located in the far north of the country among high mountain peaks, it’s jammed like a thumb between once-forbidden Himalayan kingdoms: Nepal to the west, Bhutan to the east, and Sikkim (and then Tibet) to the north. The closest airport is Bagdogra, outside Siliguri, a hot, flat city down at the edge of the northeastern plains where the Himalayas begin their abrupt crest. From Delhi, Bagdogra is a two-hour flight east, paralleling the snowy, sinewy range; from Kolkata less, but still a solid hour flight straight north.
In March and April—dreaded April, “herald of horrors,” E. M. Forster called it, when the sun returns “with power but without beauty”1—as winter lurches into summer, the flat landscape is parched. The browns turn bronze and sandy as the plane travels east. From above, through the hovering, dusty haze, the landscape takes on the sepia tone of an old American West photograph, and the ambling, channeled Ganges glints like a dulled scissor blade on its lazy arc to the Bay of Bengal. Walking down the narrow stairs from the airplane and across the tarmac, with fresh tar painted in broad strokes along its weathered cracks, to Bagdogra’s low, white terminal, the sharp glare makes disembarking passengers wince, and the heat smacks with the unsettling force of an open palm.
While fields of tea are immediately around the airport—flat expanses broken by sal trees with tall, straight trunks—the famed estates of Darjeeling are on the slopes that rise through the shimmering, hot air to the north.
Darjeeling is just fifty miles away by road. But it takes about four hours to reach.
From the airport, seven or eight slow miles bring one to Siliguri, as traffic braids around potholes, bicycles and cycle rickshaws, goats, rusted buses, high-riding military trucks, and pale cows with coffin-shaped skulls. Schoolgirls with pigtails tied in colored ribbons walk along the uneven lip of the blacktop. Boys in boiled white shirts, their uniform jackets dangling jauntily by a thumb over the shoulder, follow behind. Long-stemmed leaves on pipal trees dangle downward, heart-shaped pendulums that rustle like muffled wind chimes with the slightest breeze. Rusted corrugated-tin roofs cover the small houses. Once the monsoon rains arrive in heady, uneven bursts, they turn the houses into reverberating echo chambers—and the road to muck. But in early spring, it’s sweltering and dusty, and the relief of rain only a distant dream.
Once across the Balasan River, the route turns north up the Rohini Road toward the crumpled eruption of hills just discernible in the haze. In June 2010, landslides wiped out the main Hill Cart Road in a
trio of places, and it has yet to be repaired. For the first half of the journey, the main route now cuts up a parallel valley to the west instead.
After passing through a cluster of small shops selling sodas and paan, school satchels and wicker tables, the road opens up and runs flat and straight at the foothills as it cuts between two tea estates—Longview on the left, the lower sections of Rohini on the right. Goats graze in the scrub, and a troop of macaques—pale brown fur, pinkish faces—squat patiently at the edge of the road as if waiting for a bus. A traffic sign cautions against elephants crossing; a handful of brilliant-white, erect egrets stand in sprouting fields; and browned, plate-size leaves, curled like old leather chappals, get swept along the blacktop behind trucks.
The lurch upward is sudden, and the flatness quickly turns steep and tropical. Passing through a handful of terraced rice fields, rippling green with tender, springtime shoots, the road begins to switchback, looping around clusters of bamboo stout as flagpoles and broad as a man’s thigh, patches of wild bananas, and thick-buttressed trees with knobby boles. Blue, blunt-nosed trucks barrel downhill with processed first flush teas under the cinched canvas tarps and return carrying everything else to the out-of-the-way part of India. Uphill traffic has the right of way on the tightest stretches.
With its close position to the Bay of Bengal and the monsoon winds whose moisture condenses and causes heavy rainfall when they come against the mountain range, this is the most humid part of the entire Himalayan chain. “The abrupt juxtaposition of so many different biotopes of life zones—ranging from almost plains level”—Siliguri is a mere four hundred feet above sea level—“to over 6000 m [20,000 feet], and from tropical heat to arctic cold—all telescoped within a straight-line distance of hardly more than 80 km [50 miles],” wrote one of India’s greatest naturalists, Sálim Ali, “has given to the eastern Himalayas a flora and fauna which for richness and variety is perhaps unequalled in the world.”2 Mark Twain, traveling to Darjeeling in the 1890s, was impressed by the journey—“so wild and interesting and exciting and enchanting”—but even more by the variety of roadside fauna. “As for the vegetation, it is a museum,” he wrote of his ascent to the hill station in Following the Equator. “The jungle seemed to contain samples of every rare and curious tree and bush that we had ever seen or heard of. It is from that museum, I think, that the globe must have been supplied with the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious.”3
At Kurseong (4,864 feet)—roughly the halfway point to Darjeeling—the Rohini Road feeds into Hill Cart Road, and the air, subtly, begins to freshen. Ahead, tiers of alpine greens; but looking back, the dust of the plains hangs in the air below as if the road spirals up from nothing but glare.
A grassy pull-off lies a switchback or two before the junction. A pair of weathered steel benches on a knoll overlooks a trio of converging valleys. The greenness feels excessive.
Along the steep, surrounding hillsides are some of Darjeeling’s most celebrated tea estates, including Makaibari, Castleton, and Ambootia. Small groups of women can often be spotted on their slopes. They stand half-hidden between the linear rows of waist-high tea bushes, deep, conical wicker baskets on their backs, moving, almost unperceptibly, in their seemingly Sisyphean task of plucking new shoots along the grand sweep of tea-covered vista.
“From Kursiong a very steep zigzag leads up the mountain, through a magnificent forest of chestnut, walnut, oaks, and laurels,” wrote the eminent British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker on his mid-April 1848 journey up to a barely settled Darjeeling to collect plants in the region. “It is difficult to conceive a grander mass of vegetation:—the straight shafts of the timber-trees shooting aloft, some naked and clean, with grey, pale, or brown bark; others literally clothed for yards with a continuous garment of epiphytes, one mass of blossoms, especially the white Orchids, which bloom in a profuse manner, whitening their trunks like snow.”4
That description remains much the same 165 years on. At least on Hill Cart Road’s upper side. Below, patches of tea now cover much of the land, which falls sharply away toward the valley’s base with a clutch of estates whose borders interlock like hand-cut jigsaw pieces: Monteviot, Edenvale, Margaret’s Hope, Oaks, Singell, Rington, Dilaram, Balasun, Kaley Valley, Pussimbing.
The road cleaves through dense, tall evergreen forests with lichen-covered oaks and rhododendrons and runs for long stretches under a canopy of cool, shading foliage. Great bands of liana thick as cables sag among branches, and mosses and blooming climbers run up century-old brick retaining walls like vertical flower beds. Traffic is heavy from morning until dark, and drivers obey the signs that read HONK AT EVERY CURVE. Square stones set directly into the tarmac stud the road for traction. With the rains still a few months away, water trucks park at meager streams and siphon water into large, black plastic tanks to sell to hotels and Darjeeling residents. From telephone poles, leaf-green and white political flags flap and shimmy. Landslides and smaller landslips scar the hills and expose entrails of sheer rock like clawed gashes.
The road crests at Ghoom, elevation 7,407 feet. It passes an open-sided Darjeeling Himalayan Railway station—steam escapes from one of the coal-fired engines of the “toy train” that still plies a section of the narrow-gauge rail line; waiting passengers wear hats and coats in the chilly air—and then beneath an important nineteenth-century Buddhist monastery with gently curving rooftop corners and a hedge of sacred flags. From here, it’s a gentle half-dozen-mile descent into Darjeeling.
The city soon comes into sight clinging to the steep ridges and shelves of the hillsides. The setting is dramatic. In Hooker’s description:
Dorjiling station occupies a narrow ridge, which divides into two spurs, and descends steeply to the bed of the great Rungeet river, up whose course the eye is carried to the base of the great snowy mountains. The ridge itself is very narrow at the top, along which most of the houses are perched, while others occupy positions on its flanks, where narrow locations on the east, and broader ones on the west, are cleared from wood. The valleys on either side are at least 6000 feet deep, forest-clad to the bottom, with very few and small level spots, and no absolute precipice; from their flanks project innumerable little spurs, occupied by native clearings.5
Beyond the city, the heavily forested Himalayan foothills layer off in waves toward an uninterrupted jumble of silvery-white peaks that stretch across the horizon and include the magnificent Kanchenjunga. The name means Five Treasures of Snow, after the five peaks that dominate the skyline like a collection of sails with their wide snowfields, glaciers, and blunt, angular whiteness. At 28,169 feet, it’s the world’s third-tallest peak behind Everest and K2. Kanchenjunga’s proximity and the feeling of its hovering over Darjeeling is wholly unexpected.
Modern Darjeeling has spilled beyond its confines to sprawl farther along the ridges in a denser and more crowded clutter, and bulky cement structures have replaced most of the old wooden buildings, but the first view from the front seat is much the same as it has been for many decades.
So is the feeling of it as a frontier town when entering the crowded lower bazaar with its eclectic gathering of people—mountain peoples, with their coppery, Himalayan features—from surrounding hills and the strong sense of movement. Jeeps—so-called, but actually similar-looking Mahindra Boleros as well as Tata Sumos, beefy Mahindra Scorpios, and the odd vintage Land Rover patched together with few original parts—are continually being loaded or unloaded with passengers and bundles secured with rope.
The journey up from Siliguri is arduous and exhausting. Most people immediately look for a cup of tea. But one notable Darjeeling hotel, acknowledging the frazzling drive, hands arriving guests small snifters of local cherry brandy instead.
The pitched landscape is steeped with the religious, the sacred, and the picturesque. The tea’s essence, uniqueness, and greatness begins in this terroir—naturally, but also spiritually.
The name Darjeeling comes from Dorji Ling, where the thunderb
olt of the Hindu deity Lord Indra—King of the Heavens, God of War, God of Rain and Storms—fell. The spot it landed is known as Observatory Hill, the highest place in Darjeeling. In the late-eighteenth century, Nepalese troops destroyed the Buddhist monastery that stood atop it, and today a complex of shrines and small temples mark the location that is holy to Buddhists and also Hindus. Prayer flags flutter in the wind, gradually shred, and carry threads of goodwill off to distant lands.
Arcing some 1,550 miles southeast across the top of the Indian subcontinent, the Himalayan mountain range guards the fountain that makes India a fertile, prosperous, and holy land. According to Hindu mythology, the Himalayas—the name means “house of snow” in Sanskrit, the ancient Indic language of Hindu scriptures and epic poems—is the abode of Lord Shiva and the place from which all water flows. Most important is the River Ganges. Known as Mother Ganges to Hindus, it represents the nectar of immortality and is a symbol of fertility. “In our legends it is said that the goddess Ganga’s descent from the heavens would have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by tying it into his ash-smeared locks,” wrote the novelist Amitav Ghosh. Lord Shiva’s hair, wound into a shell-like curl, is the source of the sacred river, which sprouts from his matted locks, “a heavenly braid,” Ghosh called it, “an immense rope of water, unfurling through a wide and thirsty plain” before untangling into the sea in “hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands.”6
The Himalayas give not just water, then, but life.
From these mountains, locals believe, the breath of God blows cool air down over the Darjeeling hills and brings mist and fog and moisture that nurtures the neat rows of tabled, jade-green tea bushes that follow the steep contours of the valleys around this Victorian hill town.
The tea bushes seem a natural, integrated part of the surrounding hills, but they are not indigenous. Tea was only planted on these slopes just over a century and a half ago, a few years after the town began to take shape, at the tail end of a lengthy and improbable journey.
