Darjeeling (11 page)

The body of a second flush tea is fuller but still relaxed, the flavors deeper and less grassy, a touch more prominent on the palate, yet roundly mellow with a sweetish, fruity, often peachy note. And, important for connoisseurs, Darjeeling tea’s renowned muscatel flavor—a musky spice with sweet hints—is more pronounced. So pronounced that the season often carries the moniker “muscatel flush.”

The year’s opening harvest might garner excitement and attention, but this second one, famed for its concentrated signature flavors, fetches just as high prices.

It also offers a special quirk of nature when an infestation of insects is actually beneficial. For a couple of weeks, tea jassids (
Empoasca flavescens
)
—
commonly called green flies in Darjeeling, even though they look more like mini-grasshoppers just one-tenth-inch long—come and feed on the leaves. “They suck out the moisture and the leaf shrivels downward,” said Sujoy Sengupta at the Chamong Tee group’s headquarters in Kolkata on a steamy, late-summer afternoon. Holding out a hand, he curled his fingers down into an arthritic claw. “It is called, in Nepali,
kakreko patti
.
Patti
is ‘leaf,’ and
kakreko
is ‘curled,’” he explained, noting that this doesn’t kill the leaf completely but stunts its growth, which further concentrates flavors. “This is the topmost quality of leaf.”

The pinpricks the tea jassids make as they feed start natural fermentation. Fine veins of brown appear on the edges, like the dark fissures in an old tea-stained porcelain tasting cup. There is a patina of death while the leaf surrounding it remains wholly alive and freshly green, a dichotomy that offers, for Banerjee, “symmetry for the senses.”

*
 Summer in Darjeeling is the premonsoon season, beginning sometime in April and running to July. The hottest month tends to be May.

Darjeeling as it exists today began as a strip of isolated, heavily forested ridges that the rajah of the Kingdom of Sikkim deeded to the East India Company. It was not part of a specific, long-term plan of British colonial expansion, but a more piecemeal and opportunistic move among Himalayan kingdoms. Similar small steps were being taken elsewhere as the disjointed puzzle of the subcontinent was being pulled together under a unified British rule and aligned princely states, and the map of India gradually became further shaded in British red.

In the 1780s, Gorkhas from Nepal marched into Sikkim and began wrestling away territory in the lower foothills and skirting flatlands, and eventually seized land as far east as the Teesta River. But when the Nepalese looked to take the rest of Sikkim, the British intervened with the 1814–16 Anglo-Gorkha (or Nepalese) War. The East India Company signed a treaty with Sikkim in 1817 and returned some four thousand square miles of reclaimed territory to the rajah and guaranteed his sovereignty over it. The British essentially wanted a forty-mile-wide buffer zone—Joseph Hooker fittingly called it a “fender”
¹
—between Nepal and Bhutan to keep them apart for two reasons: to prevent them from fighting with each other, but also to prevent them from forming an alliance against the British, who controlled the bordering territory to the south.

The ruling family of Sikkim was largely Tibetan, while its subjects were mostly Lepchas and other tribes, a cause of internal friction. When the rajah had a Lepcha leader assassinated, many of the leader’s followers fled west into Nepal. Aided by the Gorkhas, they commenced a series of
raids on Sikkim.
²
The dispute drew the attention of the East India Company, which, following a treaty article, was bound to arbitrate any conflict between Sikkim and its neighbors. The Company dispatched Captain George Lloyd, a forty-year-old commander of a nearby army camp, and J. W. Grant, an explorer and the commercial resident of Malda (a village on the plains about halfway to Calcutta, now called English Bazar), who were familiar with the terrain.

During their 1829 trip, the two men spent six days at “the old Goorka station called Dorjeling,” the first Europeans to do so. No doubt they were besotted by the spot’s beauty and views. On seeing the chain of mountains that stand to the north of Darjeeling, “the observer is struck with the precision and sharpness of their outlines,” wrote Joseph Hooker in his
Himalayan Journals
, “and still more with the wonderful play of colours on their snowy flanks, from the glowing hues reflected in orange, gold and ruby, from clouds illumined by the sinking or rising sun, to the ghastly pallor that succeeds with twilight, when the red seems to give place to its complementary colour, green.”
³

The governor-general of India, Lord Bentinck—not long in his position and still a few years away from forming the Tea Committee—pressed for more on the region’s suitability as a sanitarium. The East India Company had begun establishing hill station retreats, with healthy mountain climates and clean air, for their men to recuperate from the heat and ill effects of the tropical climate. (Air was considered to be the source of numerous diseases, from cholera to malaria, whose name derives from the Italian
mal’aria
, “bad air.”) Delhi and the Punjab had Shimla (Simla) and Mussoorie nearby, Madras had Ootacamund (affectionately known as Ooty) in the Nilgiri mountains, to the southeast of Bombay rose the hills of Poona, and soon the company would lease Mt. Abu in Rajasthan from its princely owner. But soldiers stationed in Calcutta and around Bengal had no convenient Company settlement to escape the heat.

After Lloyd and Grant wrote encouragingly of the area’s potential in their report, Bentinck sent Grant back, along with the deputy surveyor-general of India, Captain James Herbert, a trained geologist with considerable Himalayan experience, to fully assess the site’s suitability. Grant’s 1830 report suggested Darjeeling was ideally situated for a sanitarium but also, importantly, offered a vantage point to keep watch on the Lepchas and Nepalese, control over a key pass to Nepal, and access to trade with Sikkim and Tibet.

A formal request was made to the Rajah of Sikkim for the land that same year. Lloyd assumed it would be easy to obtain cession, but the petition was denied.
⁴

The Company instructed Lloyd to acquire it “on the first convenient occasion.”
⁵
Another border dispute erupted in 1834, and the British went to mediate again. This time they wanted the Darjeeling tract in exchange. The rajah was reluctant and offered alternatives. Lloyd continued to insist, and finally the rajah relented. By then, though, the British had told their agent to stop negotiating. Lloyd ignored instructions, secured the land, and only later informed his superiors.

Dated February 1, 1835, the deed is brief:

The Governor-General [Lord Bentinck] having expressed his desire for the possession of the hills of Darjeeling on account of its cool climate, for the purpose of enabling the servants of his Government, suffering from sickness, to avail themselves of its advantages, I, the Sikkimputtee Rajah, out of friendship for the said Governor-General, hereby present Darjeeling to the East India Company, that is, all the land south of the Great Ranjeet river, east of the Balasur, Kahail and Little Runjeet rivers, and west of the Rungno and Mahanadi rivers.
⁶

What had been a request for land to house a sanitarium became a generous 138-square-mile tract, an unconditional gift. In exchange, the rajah received one rifle, one double-barreled shotgun, twenty yards of red broadcloth, and two pairs of shawls, one of superior quality, the other inferior. A few years later the government granted the rajah an allowance of Rs 3,000 per annum for compensation, then doubled it to Rs 6,000.

Once in East India Company hands, Lloyd returned to the site in November 1836, along with an assistant surgeon, to spend the winter and spring studying the area and its climate in detail. The Company hoped to avoid a fate similar to that of another hill station recently built in Assam at Cherrapunji, which turned out to be the wettest place on earth.
^*

The men submitted their final report in June 1837, and the Company decided to proceed with the considerable challenge of establishing a town. The hills were steep and spurred, cleaved by precipitous valleys with few level spots, and largely covered with nearly impassable growth. “All is still forest and so thick that one can hardly crawl through it,” wrote one settler in the early 1840s.
⁷
Everything had to be brought up from the plains on bullock carts, then carried by porters along the series of
chorbatos
(paths) that ran through the dense, primeval forests.
⁸
Tigers and leopards roamed the hills, with small bears, Himalayan wolves, and numerous species of highly venomous snakes. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes came out at dusk, monkeys pillaged the maize fields at night, and during the wet months leeches became endemic. Perhaps the biggest torment on the way to and from Darjeeling were tiny, robust black flies called
peepsa
(or
pipsa; Simulium indicum
), which managed to get through the finest mesh nets.
⁹
Their bites caused swelling, intolerable itching, and no small number of workers brought in from the plains to flee the area.

The Darjeeling tract, Lloyd wrote in an early report, had no villages and only twenty to thirty houses. Though sparsely inhabited, the land—home to the Lepcha people—was not
un
inhabited.

When the British arrived, the Lepcha still practiced a type of migratory agriculture called
jhum
. Just before the rainy season, they would burn a tract of forest, making room to plant and also releasing nutrients in the ash. Once rain fell, and the ash had soaked into the earth, they planted. After intensely farming a plot for three years, with the land exhausted from a rapid string of different crops, they abandoned the site and repeated the process elsewhere. Firing season made for spectacular displays, as Hooker—one of the first to document Lepcha agricultural traditions in detail—recorded:

The voices of the birds and insects being hushed, nothing is audible but the harsh roar of the rivers, and occasionally, rising far above it, that of the forest fires. At night we were literally surrounded by them; some smoldering, like shale-heaps at a colliery, others fitfully bursting forth, whilst others again stalked along with a steadily increasing and enlarging flame, shooting out great tongues of fire, which spared nothing as they advanced with irresistible might. Their triumph is in
reaching a great bamboo clump, when the noise of the flames drowns that of the torrents, and as the great stem-joints burst from the expansion of confined air, the report is as that of a salvo from a park of artillery. At Dorjiling the blaze is visible, and the deadened reports of the bamboos bursting is heard throughout the night; but in the valley, and within a mile of the scene of destruction, the effect is the most grand, being heightened by the glare reflected from the masses of mist which hover above.
¹⁰

Lepchas were short, with dark, coppery skin and Mongolian features. They went barefoot and mostly bareheaded (their hats, when they had them, were made of leaves and plaited slips of bamboo), and wore long, red-and-white-striped robes of untreated wool or cotton cloth, which wrapped around the body, pinned at the shoulder, and tied at the waist. Over their shoulders the men slung wooden sheaths that held a two-foot-long knife and a pouch of arrows for hunting birds. “They are constantly armed with a long, heavy, straight knife,” which, Hooker wrote, “serves equally for plough, toothpick, table-knife, hatchet, hammer, and sword.”
¹¹
(To these tasks another early commentator added “hoe, spade, and nail parer.”)
¹²
Hooker also noted the bamboo bow and quiver of arrows they carried along with a pouch holding aconite to poison their tips.
¹³

Keen hunters and highly skilled trackers and herbalists, the Lepcha collected roots, leaves, and herbs from the forest, foraged for wild honey and fungi, and trapped fish in the streams. They grew oranges and tapioca, farmed cardamom under large trees on the steep slopes, and planted terraces of rice. Bamboo was key. Not only did the Lepcha utilize twenty-two different varieties of it that grew in the area,
¹⁴
but they believed God created bamboo along with their people.
¹⁵

They called their land Mayel Lyang, Abode of the Gods. While, gradually over the centuries, the Lepcha largely adopted Buddhism, they never fully forwent some of their culture’s more primitive spiritual elements. Early Lepchas observed a religion called Bon that worshipped nature in its physical forms—trees, forests, rivers, lakes, mountains—with God omnipresent in them. “Though the first man and woman were created out of pure snow from
Kingtsoomzaongboo Chyue
(Mt. Kanchenjunga), each clan, after the downfall of man, had its own lake and mountain,” wrote Dennis Lepcha, a member and adviser to the Indigenous Lepcha Tribal Association. “Hence, after death, a Lepcha soul
will rest in the lap of his ancestors who are residing in their respective clan’s mountain and lake.”
¹⁶
According to another Lepcha author, they “chant their hymns and prayers in the tune of birds, in the sound of winds, water-falls, rivers, etc.”
¹⁷
Call it an ecotheology or ecosophy.