Darjeeling (24 page)

Save for one caveat, the 1907
Darjeeling Gazetteer
carried the typical enthusiastic attitude of early commentators on their work ethic: “The Nepalis, who form the great majority, although extremely improvident, are a cheerful, hardworking, and enterprising race, courageous to a degree, and pleasant to work with, so long as they are treated with fairness and consideration.”
²⁹
But the gardens required not just labor but
inexpensive
labor, which was, as the
Gazetteer
noted in that global and timeless dictum of economically profitable agriculture, “a matter of vital importance to the [tea] industry, as cheap labour is essential to its prosperity.”
³⁰

Ultimately the gardens set up a system that would entice the workers to come and, importantly, remain. Along with daily wages, they were
offered housing and basic necessities. Because the gardens were so isolated, they also received food rations. Workers and their families settled on the estates in small villages based largely on caste or clan. Spread over a garden’s hillsides and surrounded by fields of tea, these consist of tight clusters of small, wood-framed homes with two or three rooms and a covered but usually open-air kitchen. Flowering plants, herbs, and the occasional ripening chili pod grow in chipped clay pots, chickens poke around, and pale pye-dogs lounge in the morning sun. Garden villages contain schools, temples, a day care, and a medical clinic, plus small shops selling staples from potatoes and batteries to soda and umbrellas.

Pay amounts are fixed across all of Darjeeling’s estates in an agreement negotiated every three years between the Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA) and the Darjeeling Indian Tea Association (DITA), representing the gardens,
^*
various unions representing the workers, and the West Bengal government. For April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2014, the daily pay rate was set at Rs 90 (about $1.60), with full pay for twelve weeks of maternity leave and two-thirds pay for sick days. Workers in the factories get another five or so rupees a day as they are considered “technical.” This applies to spraying teams in the field as well. The extra money is known as “pay-of-post.” Wages do not go down if a garden loses money.

But wages are only part of labor expenses. On top of salaries, a garden covers medicine and education costs. It contributes to a provident fund for retirement of fifteen days per each year of work, so that after forty years a worker receives the equivalent of six hundred days’ pay. Babies get formula, infants get child care (allowing mothers to work), and children get schooling. Upon death, the garden provides wood for a pyre or a casket, depending on belief or preference. Per week, each permanent worker is allotted just over two pounds of rice plus eighteen ounces for each minor dependent, and five pounds of atta flour plus twenty-four ounces for each minor dependent for making flatbreads. And, of course, tea. Clean drinking water is provided, as well as blankets, rubber boots, firewood, and lime to whitewash their houses. Some estates encourage farming by giving tools and seeds for growing cardamom, ginger, turmeric, and oranges.

Positions are hereditary. When a plucker retires, she can pass her right to a position on the estate to one of her children. Or sell it.

“Only in tea plantations are you taken care of from birth to death,” Sandeep Mukherjee of the DTA said. In 2013, these additional items were valued by the Indian Tea Association at Rs 93.97 per worker per day, just above the daily wage.

Talking to a handful of men who grew up on Makaibari, the perquisite they remember most fondly as children was getting balls and boots to play on the estate’s rough soccer pitch—a barren, flat expanse of dirt that drops immediately off to a nearly vertical ravine—among themselves but also in highly competitive intergarden games. While sport across India is dominated by cricket, Darjeeling (and Sikkim) is soccer country, and young boys frequently wear knockoff maroon-and-blue-striped Barça jerseys with, ideally,
MESSI
and the number 10 stenciled in gold across the back.

*
The British spell their name with a
u
—
Gurkahs
—though around Darjeeling it always has an
o
. They generally prefer to be called Indian Gorkha.

*
The two are similar umbrella organizations. The DTA is older, larger—it represents about three-fourths of Darjeeling’s gardens—and more active in labor issues.

India gained independence on August 15, 1947. A new era for the country ensued—and for Darjeeling tea. Many European owners sold their estates to wealthy Indians, perhaps believing they would never enjoy the same authority they had before.
¹
In some cases, suppliers became owners. Local contractors, for instance, supplied wood for chests used to pack tea and, over the years, accrued credit. They tallied the IOUs and then paid the difference between what they were owed and the value of the estate.
²

The changeover often meant that the new owners had fewer ties to the land. “Darjeeling's old managers had been rooted in the soil; they were linked to the pioneer planters and closely connected to each other through business or by marriage. Plantation labour accepted them as heaven-sent patriarchs. Tea was more than an industry, it was a way of life. The new proprietors were often wealthy businessmen who cut costs, demanded quick profits and operated long-distance.”
³
They were looking closer at bottom lines than traditions.

During the nineteenth century, estates had been planted out in a forty-forty-twenty scheme: 40 percent for the tea crop, 40 percent left wild as a natural buffer and soil anchor, and the remainder for housing and workers' facilities. But many of the new crop of owners had terraces removed, shade trees cut to plant more tea shrubs, and allowed encroachment on the natural portions, all of which destabilized the land and caused topsoil losses. Following the industrial development so strongly advocated by the country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the new owners embraced the latest generation of chemical applications. Fascinated
by science and believing that it “must be made the handmaiden of economic progress,” Nehru was keen to make India a modern, industrialized nation as quickly as possible,
⁴
with farming a priority. “Everything else can wait,” he said not long after independence, “but not agriculture.”

“Until 1955–56 there were no chemicals in tea. It was organic,” said Marybong's Vijay Dhancholia. That was when India began striving for food independence, Dhancholia explained, instead of buying “third-rate stuff from Australia and the USA” to feed the country's surging population.
Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan
(Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer) was a catchphrase coined in 1965 by the country's second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, to cheer on India's soldiers battling Pakistan along the Kashmir border, as well as farmers in their agricultural revolution. Fueling that modernizing sprint and spirit were chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. The 1966–67 harvesting year marked the onset of the
green revolution
in India, a term that didn't refer to the contemporary sense of natural or organic farming but rather making the best use of higher-yielding varieties and chemical inputs to increase production. This began a cycle of using progressively larger amounts of such inputs just to keep yields from falling.

As elsewhere in India, yields initially climbed on Darjeeling tea estates. Darjeeling estates produced 7.8 million kilograms (17.2 million pounds) of tea in 1951 and topped 10 million kilograms (22 million pounds) by 1960. To sustain levels above 10 million kilograms a year, more chemicals were thrown at the plants. These killed off useful microorganisms and also sapped the land of natural nourishment. The ground between the tea plants was kept clean so that the chemicals would be absorbed by the bushes, not weeds, which further contributed to soil erosion.

Farming had moved, within a few decades, from one extreme to another.

Although ousted as colonial rulers, the British still controlled the tea sector until 1974.
⁵
On the first day of that year the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) of 1973 was instituted.
^*
It tightened currency controls on foreign companies in India and instigated the Indianization, or rupeeization, of companies in the country by limiting foreign-owned stakes, making it harder to take profits out of India, and restricting
expansion and diversification.
⁶
Some companies complied with the new laws, but others simply left as a result. (Mostly famously, Coca-Cola pulled out rather than partner with an Indian company and turn over its secret recipe as the government demanded; they didn't return until 1993.)

While sectors, including those engaged in trading, could retain a maximum 40 percent foreign-equity holding, tea companies were given a special dispensation that allowed 74 percent ownership.
⁷
Even that was unpalatable. British firms in the tea industry that had stayed after independence had steadily been losing interest and had already begun exploring alternatives to growing tea in India. The new regulations provoked further divesting and accelerated development of estates in Kenya.
⁸
The East African country was blessed with altitude and rainfall—and room to expand. “The British had a major advantage in Africa,” wrote E. Jaiwant Paul, onetime director of tea giant Brooke Bond India, “because they could take full benefit of their decades of experience in other countries and incorporate the more recent technical advances both in cultivation and in manufacture on the African estates.”
⁹
Or, as Sandeep Mukherjee put it, “Any handicaps they had here they did away with in Kenya.”

The shift was swift. The year of independence India exported 127.2 million kilograms (280 million pounds) of tea to the UK, half of its total production and the lion's share of its total exports. A decade later it hit 135.4 million kilograms, but then began to slide.
¹⁰
By 1977 UK imports had dropped to 74.3 million kilograms, and in 1987 they were a paltry 22.4 million kilograms, down nearly 85 percent from their 1947 level.
¹¹
Currently Indian tea exports to the UK sit around 16 million kilograms. The UK now gets about 60 percent of its tea from Africa.
¹²
Today Kenya is the continent's tea giant and the world's fourth-largest producer. Grown largely in the highlands and nearly all CTC, the tea is bold and vigorous, fresh, and brews a reddish-coppery liquor. It is used in blending, often in breakfast teas.

When India lost the UK market, the USSR and Eastern Europe stepped in to replace it. In 1947, the Soviet Union imported just 4 million kilograms (8.8 million pounds) of tea from India; by 1991, imports had risen to 104.5 million kilograms (230 million pounds), 51.5 percent of India's total tea exports.
¹³

Soviet buyers preferred dark brews rather than the fine and floral qualities of tea from the Darjeeling hills. “They wanted the cheapest,” recalled the third-generation tea merchant Vijay Sarda in his Darjeeling shop Nathmulls. He sat on a stool at the door greeting acquaintances
passing along the narrow sidewalk, while his son, Girish, stood behind the counter. “They'd say, ‘We want tea in this price category and good for human consumption.' Those were the guidelines.” He laughed and shook his head at the memory. “‘And good for human consumption'!”

The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 threw the Indian tea industry into crisis. The trade agreements between the two countries that the industry had to come to rely on suddenly vanished. “We put all our eggs in one basket and pushed away the competition,” the joint-secretary of the Indian Tea Association said in a 1994
BusinessWeek
piece on Darjeeling's post-Soviet troubles.
¹⁴
With less money to spend, Russians began buying cheaper teas from places such as Sri Lanka instead of India, much less the pricey Darjeeling varieties.

Demand for Darjeeling tea plummeted and prices followed suit. That meant even less money to keep up the estates or reinvest in improving them. Many fell into ruinous conditions, were abandoned, or sold off. The total number of gardens, which had stood at 102 in 1990, fell to 83 by 1995.
¹⁵

So Darjeeling turned its attention to Western Europe and Japan. To satisfy the Soviets' preference for big brews, heavy on liquor but less so on flavors or aromas, many Darjeeling estates had planted at least some Assam leaf, often on their lower, warmer sections. Estates began pulling these up and replanting with the smaller-leaf, slower-growing, and lower-yielding China
jat
on which Darjeeling's fame largely rests. Along with these, they began planting some of the excellent high-end cultivars grown from cuttings of strains well suited for Darjeeling's conditions that were being developed. And the gardens also began to urgently adopt farming practices that reduced their chemical and pesticide residues to permissible levels. With the Soviets, this had not been a concern, but Europeans were becoming much more conscious of the issue.
¹⁶