Darjeeling (19 page)

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.

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 through 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.”
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