Darjeeling

by Jeff Koehler

  After absorbing the moisture for a few weeks, the tea bushes begin to flush out great quantities of leaves—larger, coarser ones than those of the other harvests. But also with less flavor. “Because it jumped!” H. R. Chaudhary, Namring’s long-serving manager, said by way of explanation. “The slower you grow, the more the flavor. Same for mango, banana, for anything.” Down lower on Rohini, at the base of the hills, B. B. Singh said in a soft voice, “Slow growing, good flavors. Fast growing, no flavors.”

  How are you? “Flushed out!” Sanjay Sharma on Glenburn called out in reply on a rainy day. “The trees are flushing like crazy.”

  Factories struggle to keep up with the amount of green leaf coming in. Half the year’s harvest in a single flush. But the dampness also makes withering and fermenting harder to manage and producing fine, delicate teas, appreciated for their nuance, difficult.

  Rain teas: quantity over quality.

  During this wet harvest, the nature of the tea liquor changes, becomes stronger, and turns the deep reddish brown of a Spanish cedar cigar box. Even ruddier.

  And prices drop. The leaves picked during the monsoon yield the majority of the blends and are sold non-estate-specific. It’s blenders’ season in the J. Thomas & Co. auction room.

  One ducks through the open door of Nathmulls, in the center of Darjeeling, from a sudden squall and finds—as always—Girish Sarda standing patiently behind the counter. Nathmulls sells 150 different Darjeeling teas. Not a single one is monsoon flush. In front of Girish sit three dozen large, old-fashioned candy jars. They have wooden lids, rounded as mushroom caps, with the grains running across the tops like the oversize whorl of a thumbprint, and hold prize black teas from the first and second flushes plus one or two from the previous autumn.

  But now, on one end of the long glass counter in Nathmulls, some jars contain fine green teas. More estates are using this flush to make a style of tea not traditionally associated with the region. Being unfermented, they carry the natural vegetal notes of the season rising up from the saturated soil: brothy and grassy, at times even kelpy, with hints of artichokes and silky spinach.

  “It’s got that tinge, that certain taste of Darjeeling tea, a sweetness there,” Sarda said one soggy morning, “a certain taste that comes through that inherent bitterness intrinsic in green teas.” He stood with his arms crossed watching the steady parade of people with umbrellas passing outside the shop as a fresh curtain of water sluiced the city. Rivulets of water cascaded down Laden-la Road, so steep and slick that nugget-size stones have been embedded directly into the tar for traction.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Raj in the Hills Above

  The British thirst for inexpensive tea significantly shaped the history and rule of India. “The Flag went forth so that Trade could follow,” wrote Jan Morris, keen chronicler of British colonialism, “and very often, in point of fact, the order was reversed.”1 Trade and empire swung hand in hand, and indeed commerce brought the British to India—initially in the guise of the East India Company, merchants! Soon profits and tax revenues helped develop this most dazzling and extraordinary imperial possession. “As long as we rule India we are the greatest power in the world,” Lord Curzon said as viceroy in 1901, referring to modern-day India but also Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma. “If we lose it, we shall drop straight-away to a third-rate power.”2

  India was not a settler colony like Australia or Canada. Most British returned back home at the end of their working life. But they were not transients. The relationship lasted three centuries, and some 2 million Brits died in the subcontinent, most prematurely, many by tropical diseases.3

  The degree of interaction between the British and those they ruled is unexpected, wrote acclaimed Delhi-based author and historian William Dalrymple. “Contrary to stereotype, a surprising number of company men responded to India by slowly shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin and adopting Indian dress and taking on the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace.”4 Some wore lungis (a sort of cotton loincloth) and ate spicy local dishes; others went further with friendships, business partnerships, love affairs, even marriage, and not infrequently children. At times they did this in dramatic fashion. Calcutta-founder Job Charnock notoriously snatched a young Hindu from her husband’s funeral pyre and lived with her and their extended family.

  Numerous Company employees became exceptional scholars, studying Sanskrit and producing treatises on temple sculpture or translating classic religious texts. Charles Wilkins did the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1785; a decade later, William Jones—linguist, founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and judge on the Supreme Court of Bengal—prepared one of the important Vedic discourses known as Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu). Both were sponsored by the first governor-general for British India, William Hastings.5 With a mastery of Urdu and Hindu, Hastings also backed translations of important Islamic texts,6 founded an Islamic college in Calcutta,7 and ordered the construction of a Buddhist temple along the Hooghly.8

  The depth of involvement for many men was profound. Dalrymple found that more than a third of British men working for the East India Company in India in the 1780s left in their wills their possessions to Indian wives or children from Indian women.9 Children with a father rich enough were often sent back to school in England. “According to one estimate of 1789, one boy in every 10 at English schools was ‘coloured’—but not too dark,” Ian Jack observed,10 responding to reports that DNA tests showed Prince William has Indian blood, traced back to Eliza Kewark, the housekeeper of Theodore Forbes (1788–1820), a Scottish merchant working in the port of Surat, and passed down on Princess Diana’s side.

  But such intermingling didn’t last. Along with the starched mores of Victorian society imported into India’s ruling class, two events hastened its end and set up the environment for Rudyard Kipling’s famous edict that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”11

  One was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The journey from Britain to India around the Cape had been reduced from six months to three or four with the advent of the steamship in the mid-nineteenth century and was further trimmed down to as many weeks by cutting through the canal. Wives and children could join the men, friends come for the cool season, and visits be made back to Britain. Home became harder to forgo and impossible to forget.

  European womenfolk, though, needed to be secluded, or at least protected. That included wives, sisters, and aunts, as well as the young, unmarried ladies who traveled out to India to spend the festive winter season with married relatives. Their annual influx was dubbed the Fishing Fleet. With a (European) male-to-female ratio of roughly four to one, India became fertile husband-hunting ground among colonial administrators, army officers, businessmen, and even planters. Fit from plenty of sport, dashing when in uniform, and craving attention from the opposite sex, the men feted the eligible ladies with balls and afternoon teas, shooting parties (a tiger hunt with a bejeweled maharaja for the truly connected), races at the Gymkhana, and picnics in tea gardens or under Himalayan deodars. They escorted them on morning rides and walks in the hills to see orchids and rhododendrons, played afternoon games of tennis on the clay courts, and danced at the Club to gramophone records in the evening, all chaperoned of course. Romances were, by necessity, quick, as the hot weather spelled an end to the social season. Young ladies who failed to snag a spouse by the heat’s arrival traveled back to Britain as “Returned Empties.”12

  Those who did catch a husband became full memsahibs and often ended up in remote posts, not only far from the London (or Oxford or Edinburgh) society in which they had spent their lives, but also from the parties and exotic excursions where they had first been wooed in India. Along with not succumbing to cholera, typhoid, smallpox, dysentery, and malaria, avoiding prickly heat and snakes, and trying to adapt to life in a highly unfamiliar country, they frequently had to endure large chunks of time alone while their husbands traveled thro
ugh the districts they administered or went off on military maneuvers. Fellow foreigners were generally few, or too far away, to visit. Contact with Indians remained largely restricted to their servants and often limited to a level of the local language known as kitchen Hindustani. Children brought a measure of comfort, though both boys and girls were nearly always sent home—a place they had never set foot—to boarding school, often as young as eight years old, to forge independence and proper British character.13

  Another major event that hampered the intermingling of the British with the locals was the uprising of 1857, also known to the British as the Mutiny and to Indians as the First War of Independence. Tensions between the rulers and the ruled had been mounting for some time on the street and, more dangerously, among the Indian soldiers—sepoys—in the East India Company’s barracks. The tipping point came when their Enfield rifles began using a new cartridge rumored to be greased either in tallow (beef fat, which was offensive to Hindus) or pork fat (offensive to Muslims). The cartridges had to be bitten open before they could be used, an act that made a Hindu lose caste and defiled a Muslim.

  The rebellion started in Meerut when Bengal army soldiers shot their British officers, moved to Delhi, drew in the aging Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their figurehead, and eventually spread along the Gangetic plain. The rebellion was put down ferociously but not swiftly. It took the British more than a year to fully quell it. The costs were dreadful, and reprisals on both sides viciously brutal. Zafar’s heirs—his two sons and grandson—were killed in cold blood, and the last Mughal emperor was exiled to Rangoon, where he died as a prisoner and was buried in an unmarked grave. In the aftermath, mutual distrust increased along with separation, racial isolation, and British feelings of superiority.

  The rebellion, Dalrymple wrote, “marked the end of both the East India Company and the Mughal dynasty, the two principal forces that had shaped Indian history over the previous three hundred years, and replaced both with undisguised imperial rule by the British government.”14

  It was a decisive moment in the British rule of India. In 1874, the East India Company, “formidable rival of states and empires, with power to acquire territory, coin money, command fortresses and troops, form alliances, make war or peace, and exercise both civil and criminal jurisdiction,”15 was effectively dissolved, and the British Crown assumed all of the Company’s responsibilities and administration of the country. The metamorphosis from commercial traders—boxwallahs!—to imperialists was official. The governor-general was now viceroy, and within a couple of decades, Queen Victoria would become Empress of India. “We don’t rule this country anymore,” Ronald Merrick says in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. “We preside over it in accordance with a book of rules written by people back home.”16 He wasn’t exaggerating. In 1901 less than a thousand British officials of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) administered, with unshakable self-confidence, the affairs of more than 300 million people. They were backed by 60,000 British troops and 120,000 Indian troops,17 not to mention the tens—or hundreds—of thousands of Indians who supported the ICS and ran the day-to-day operations of the country and did the main work of the administration.

  After the uprising, the British in India, went the convention, had to remain above India (and Indians) and not become a part of it (or equals among them). The narrator in Kipling’s story “Beyond the Pale” baldly states the prevailing opinion: “A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed.”18 In the years that followed the rebellion, Dalrymple noted, “There was almost complete apartheid, an almost religious belief in racial differences, and little friendship or marriage across strictly policed racial and religious boundaries.”19

  As the eminent Indian intellectual Gurcharan Das commented, the British, for the most part, “did not interfere with our ancient traditions and our religion.” They were generally religiously tolerant of their Hindu and Muslim subjects, and India preserved its spiritual heritage, customs, and monuments. Past invaders—Aryans, Turks, Afghans, and Mughals—“merged and became Indian.” The Brits were different. “They did not merge with us and remained aloof to the end.”20

  Hill stations were a physical rendering of such aloofness.

  The British “could start from scratch” on distant hilltops to be “celestially withdrawn from the Indian millions on the plains below,” live “a few months in the year entirely for themselves,”21 and “pretend that India had receded from their lives.”22

  The stations, built for Europeans, developed as oases of European civilization in the form of idyllic English or Scottish villages: churches with Gothic edifices, stained glass, and bell towers, bandstands for concerts with strident military tunes, the mall—limited to pedestrians and horses—for strolling, and, most notably in Shimla, a lively amateur theatrical season. Half-timbered, Tudor-style bungalows with low roofs and porches perched precariously on hillsides and offered stunning views. Owners christened them with names such as Willowdale, Springbrook, and Briar and surrounded them with roses and ornamental plants often raised from British seed. These flowering beds formed “a cordon sanitaire to keep India at bay.”23 For “Britishers,” hill stations were a fundamental part of life during the colonial era.

  But hill stations were not intended to be tourist resorts as they are today. Rather, they were built as sanitariums for East India Company employees to rest and recuperate. With excruciating summer temperatures on India’s plains and tropical maladies cutting short the life span of British soldiers, whose numbers increased greatly after the uprising of 1857, Britain began building convalescent settlements in the mountains in the second half of the nineteenth century. Within a couple of decades, some eighty hill stations, from the grand (Shimla, Ooty, Darjeeling) to the less noted (Yercaud in Tamil Nadu, Almora and Ranikhet in Uttar Pradesh), were spread across the subcontinent.24

  Ranging from four thousand to eight thousand feet in elevation, their initial attraction was a less oppressive climate that offered a chance to regain health and recoup one’s old vigor. Heat was a frequent source of problems, although not infrequently exacerbated by inadequate clothing. Soldiers were still dressing in woolens and colorful Napoleonic-era uniforms with heavy ornamental insignia more suitable for a Central European battlefield than the scorching plains of the Indian subcontinent. The diet contained often excessively and unsuitably heavy food and too many bottles of fortified Madeira from Portugal. “We blame India for all our ailments, forgetting to accommodate our habits to its climate,” The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, the domestic bible for the British in India that ran through at least ten editions between 1888 and 1921, sternly admonished,25 mindful that it took far too long for flannels to be replaced by cotton undergarments and girdles left in the closet.

  At first modest, hill stations grew into a pure and distilled expression of the Britishness of the Empire26 and potent colonial emblems. From 1864 until 1947, the summer capital of British India was an improbably small and inaccessible mountain resort. “From Shimla were directed the affairs of 308 million people—two and a half times the population, by Gibbon’s estimate, of the Roman Empire at its climax,” Morris noted.27 Or, at the time, about one-fifth of mankind.

  Shimla might have been comfortable, even somewhat familiar, but it took weeks to reach from the capital. Until 1911, when the newly crowned King-Emperor George V transferred it to Delhi, the capital of British India was Calcutta, some twelve hundred miles from Shimla. But when the heat arrived, as Kipling wrote:

  … the Rulers in that City by the Sea

  Turned to flee—

  Fled, with each returning Spring-tide, from its ills

  To the Hills.28

  The level of British organization and the depth of desire, even desperation, to flee the heat culminated with the yearly move of the entire central government apparatus piece by piece from the capital into the hills when the hot weather arrived, and then back down again when it receded.29 The caravan of bullock carts, camels, a
nd elephants, syces (grooms) and scribes, guards, memsahibs and children, cooks and ayahs making their way slowly to the hills was befitting of kings and conquerors on the move. “Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps,” Geoffrey Moorhouse noted, “had nothing on the British Raj ascending to its summer retreat.”30

  Shimla had the viceroy and commander in chief in summer residence, as well as the Delhi and Punjab secretariats. But Darjeeling was the Queen of the Himalaya. Many tailgates on beefy Tata trucks and snub-nosed lorries plying the road from Siliguri today refer to it as “Queen of Hills.” Even the exacting authors of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook called the scenery the “finest of all the hill stations.” Though not before noting that it was also the dampest one in India and “leeches and ticks are a perfect pest.”31 In 1911, the year the Indian capital shifted, Darjeeling town had possibly the highest concentration of Europeans in the country with a ratio of less than ten Indians to one European, where it was overall many thousands to one.32 During the summer months, the European population doubled.

  The town spread almost vertically along a semicircular ridge, with buildings plastered to the shelves of the hillside. At the top sat the European quarter (residential bungalows and cottages, the lending library, pharmacy, Club, and church, with the steeple of St. Andrew’s as the apex), then came the cheap hotels, bazaars, huts, and native tenements below in descending consequence but increasing density down to where the rickshaws waited and carriages loaded.

  Along with being Bengal’s chief sanatorium for the convalescing, Darjeeling acted as the provincial summer capital for the regional government whose seat was a distant Calcutta, some four hundred miles south. Men working in the civil or military administration and businessmen sent their wives and children into the hills to spend the hot months in the mountain air and, if lucky, joined them for a fortnight. Early Darjeeling also attracted some wealthy Indians and a few local princes. The maharaja of Cooch Behar built a sumptuous summer home there as did the maharaja of Burdwan.