Authors: Jeff Koehler
The cow has long been sacred in India, valued but also protected. In ancient India, killing one was a serious crime tantamount to killing a Brahman and punishable by death.
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The animal has an elemental motherliness, with its milk replacing that of a baby’s mother. Cows can convert grasses and roughage that are inedible and indigestible to humans into milk, which in turn can become butter and ghee (clarified butter), yogurt, and cheese, excellent sources of protein but also some of the most important offerings for the gods. The cow was also key to rural life by providing manure for fertilizer as well as fuel. Their leather could be used for sandals, garments, and receptacles, and they could be trained to pull plows and carts.
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As a large poster hanging in Ambootia’s tasting room titled “The Cow Story” illustrates, it was the most useful of all domesticated animals.
The cow’s importance remains so on many of Darjeeling’s tea estates, especially as the number of organic gardens has dramatically increased in the last decade. Gardens generally do not own the cows; rather, they belong to those living in the estate’s villages, who sell the manure for organic fertilizer to the garden while keeping the milk to drink or to sell at the market.
Always a pioneer, Rajah went a step further in utilizing cow dung on Makaibari decades ago. Inspired by Gandhi’s notion of
swadeshi
—self-sufficiency or self-reliance—Rajah used a component from the Mahatma’s bucolic vision and offered a way to turn the dung into a clean and renewable fuel. Biogas is created from a slurry of cow manure and water via anaerobic digestion. The organic matter breaks down in a biogas plant (also called a digester), and a hood traps the methane created. This can be stored and then burned as fuel, generally for cooking.
One of the biggest advantages of biogas is that it reduces the need to cut firewood from the surrounding hillsides to use for cooking fuel. Cutting fewer trees shores up the soil of Darjeeling’s fragile hillsides against erosion, slows the spread of deforestation, and helps stop landslides that claw away at the slopes. In additon, homes become healthier by
the cutting of smoke from the kitchens, and this can improve the quality of life—and often the economic circumstances of the family. Collecting firewood was considered a woman’s job, and for many women was their single most time-consuming task, taking three or more hours a day. Being free of this provides a significant amount of time to dedicate to other pursuits, including ones that generate income. It created what Rajah calls “grassroots entrepreneurs,” who began selling their organic milk, planting and tending patches of vegetables (to eat at home or sell in the market), making paper, brewing millet wine, and opening homestays. This “income away from tea,” as he calls it, complements a household’s wages from the estate.
Such dynamic programs on Makaibari have not been without missteps. Rajah’s first foray into biogas used a community-size unit that failed within months. He revisited the idea in spring of 1988 with individual digesters. With people more personally responsible, it worked better. But visits throughout the 2013 harvest to Makaibari showed few signs of cows, and the hoods of all seven biogas digesters in Upper Makaibari were cracked and out of use.
“Maintenance is always a problem,” agreed a small group of men living in different villages around the estate. They spoke of having cows a handful of years ago—“in the years of biogas.” One said, “But it was too much work cutting grass for them.” It was easier in the beginning when they could find fodder closer. One of the men, who lives in Upper Makaibari near the factory, estimated that his village had just four or five cows, with perhaps forty to fifty in all of Makaibari. And not from any garden program. “Bought with their own money,” he said. They sell the cow dung to the garden.
While Rajah’s bucolic biogas dream remains unrealized, most homes now have gas stoves that run on propane cylinders bought in the small shops around the garden. Cooking with wood, though, has not disappeared. Gas is expensive and generally reserved for the midday meal, when time is limited. Most families still use wood to cook morning and evening meals. To warm their homes on winter evenings, they burn tea-garden prunings. No one, the men said, has heating.
Still, Rajah offers what he has done on Makaibari as a framework. “We’ve been part of creating something that could bring dynamic change,” he said in his office. “It has turned into a movement.” He was referring not only to the natural methods of farming, but also something deeper. “When you come into Makaibari, you feel a part of it.”
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Darjeeling is a favorite for visitors, and recent spells of political stability have seen numbers in town shoot up with both Indian and foreign guests. The 2010–11 season saw 135,000 domestic tourists. That number climbed to 430,000 for 2011–12 and to 730,000 for 2012–13.
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Often affectionately calling the city Darj, Indian visitors stroll the Chowrasta (and let their kids be led around it on scruffy ponies), browse the vintage photos in Das Studio, and sit on Keventer’s roof terrace, where, in Anurag Basu’s 2012 Bollywood blockbuster
Barfi!
, Ranbir Kapoor unsuccessfully proposed to Ileana D’Cruz, then climbed the nearby clock tower to turn back the time fifteen minutes, as if it had never happened. Families jam the Hasty Tasty for familiar Indian dishes, buy knitted woolen hats with tassels in the bazaar for the cold evenings, and pick up packets of tea at Nathmulls to take home as gifts.
Darjeeling’s tea and tea gardens are clearly a draw, the gardens’ lazy carpeting of green across the area a scenic attraction. But tea tourism is one initiative that remains largely untested, yet is full of promise. While West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, is keen on the concept, complaints remain about the convoluted nature of converting land from agricultural to tourism use. The gardens, who lease their land from the state government, can only transform a mere fraction of their estates to dedicated tourism usage: just five acres (two hectares), with actual construction limited to a single acre (the remaining four acres are for landscaping and beautifying the property).
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So far, just a handful of gardens have tapped into the concept and allowed people to be guests on a working estate. Each has taken a different approach.
To offer some of the many visitors who turn up at Makaibari a place to stay, the estate instigated a homestay program in 2005. According to Nayan Lama, its young coordinator, twenty-two families are engaged in the program, fifteen in the village near the factory and another seven in Phoolbari (Flower Village), on the lower reaches of Makaibari. Using microloans from the Makaibari Joint Body, each host family has constructed a separate room for guests and an outdoor Western-style toilet. For Rs 600 (about $10) per person, visitors get a room, three meals, visits to the tea fields and factory, tastings, and plenty of tea to drink. Primarily European and North American college-age students are attracted, but
Indian tourists have begun staying, too. While accommodations can be rustic at best and susceptible to power outages and water shortages, the opportunity to experience a tea estate at ground level is unique and especially tantalizing at one as well-known and innovative as Makaibari.
“Should you plan to interact positively with our working philosophy and get the true pulse and insouciance of the Makaibari spirit,” Rajah Banerjee replied after an initial inquiry, “then a homestay with one of our community members is recommended.”
The money for these, Rajah likes to point out, “goes to the woman of the house.” Clearly he trusts women more than men with fiscal diligence. While he helped get it off the ground, “now it runs itself,” he said proudly. “I don’t keep a penny.”
One of the families involved is that of Maya Davi Chettrini, the first female field supervisor, and her husband, a stocky forest ranger who helps guard the estate’s woodlands. The guest room is painted ocher red and lime green and has a pair of beds, a tall stack of soft blankets, and views down over the tea-covered valley. Dinner in the front room one spring night included dal and a tangy stewed-chicken dish with plenty of aromatic long-grain white rice, which was eaten by candlelight during an hours-long electrical outage.
Homestay mornings start not long after sunrise, with the chickens crowing and general movement among the small but dense village of Upper Makaibari. A typical breakfast includes a masala omelet (with minced tomatoes, onions, and green chilies from one of the pots alongside the house),
aloo dum
(spicy potatoes) dabbed with heady mango pickle, and plenty of freshly fried
parathas
(unleavened bread).
While guests have a second cup of Makaibari tea from an ample thermos and begin planning out their day on the garden, Maya shoulders a small cloth carryall with a bottle of water, takes from a hook outside the door her red umbrella, bleached and tattered by the elements, and heads to the fields to work.
Glenburn Tea Estate (and now Boutique Hotel) has staked out the opposite end of the tea-garden experience. Whereas Makaibari offers A Day in the Life of a Tea Plucker, Glenburn’s luxurious experience is A Day in the Life of a Tea Planter.
It’s also at the other end of the price range. Compared to Makaibari’s Rs 600 a day, an all-inclusive single at Glenburn runs around Rs 18,000
(over $300).
All-inclusive
means everything from the washing and darning of clothes to a jeep and driver at the disposal of every guest—from pick-up until drop-off. There are four-course meals, riverside picnics, and visits to the tea factory, guided walks with experts on traditional medical plants or birdlife, and hikes down to the 110-year-old Manjitar Suspension Bridge, which dangles one hundred feet above the Rangeet River as it crosses over to Sikkim. The day begins with a light tap on the door and a “bed tea”—a tray of freshly brewed tea and a few biscuits—and ends with sophisticated dishes that use tea and tea leaves as ingredients.
Husna-Tara Prakash was largely responsible for getting the hotel element of Glenburn operating. Raised in England, she attended boarding school in India at the elite Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun, then did her undergraduate and postgraduate work in the natural sciences in England at Cambridge. She married a man whose family owns Glenburn and ended up back in India. Visiting the estate the first time, she saw its potential as a special place to stay. After a major refurbishment, the first four rooms opened in 2002, followed by another four in 2008.
Standing on an upper balcony of the beefy, imposing redbrick Victorian mansion in Kolkata where Glenburn has an office, she explained that the hotel component wasn’t just something else to do along with producing tea. The key, she stressed, was to give the hospitality part of the garden full attention—from a packed picnic hamper with chicken-and-mint sandwiches, apple cake, and hot tea to unwrap at a scenic viewpoint on the long drive up to Glenburn from Bagdogra Airport to specially designed tea-patterned fabrics that decorate the rooms. Though there are only eight of them, they command a staff of fifty—all from Glenburn’s tea families.
The keys to the success of this concept were offering access to Glenburn’s charismatic resident tea planter, manager, tea maker, and snake catcher Sanjay Sharma, and making them feel like personal guests rather than paying clients. That meant showing them around the estate, leading tastings of Glenburn’s range of teas, and offering a glimpse of a planter’s working life. At the day’s end, Sanjay joined them for drinks on the verandah of the sprawling and elegantly refurbished century-old
burra
bungalow where he could hold court and tell well-honed anecdotes explaining cultural details of the garden or relate his latest snake-catching caper. Like Rajah Banerjee, he is a splendid storyteller, although his anecdotes lack the mystical platitudes so present in Rajah’s. Sanjay’s tend to be light and never preachy, rarely long, and studded with caustic,
self-deprecating zingers. He tends to stop at a good line, and the remainder of the story needs to be coaxed from him.
On one muggy summer evening, the guests eventually moved to the large, oval table in the dining room with Sanjay at its head as seasoned host but also head chef. He had developed many of the kitchen’s signature dishes, mostly original takes on international classics (tea-marbled deviled eggs) or European accents on Indian ones. Sanjay’s
plat de résistance
is succulent tea-smoked chicken breasts served on a bed of wilted spinach leaves and moistened with a tea jus aromatized by star anise, cinnamon, bay leaves, and peppercorns. While somewhat inspired by episodes of
MasterChef Australia
he catches on YouTube, it is also influenced by Sanjay’s mother, who comes from the far-northeastern Indian region bordering Burma called Nagaland, where slow-smoking is an important way of preserving. The dinner finished with Glenburn’s “chai dessert,” a thick “tea” spiced with cinnamon, ginger, bay leaf, nutmeg, and vanilla seeds scraped from a leathery pod with the tip of a sharp knife and whisked as it comes to a boil to give it the consistency of a frothy cappuccino.
Glenburn is rated number one out of all of the TripAdvisor hotels listed in Darjeeling, and it’s generally booked solid. “We also make tea,” Sanjay sarcastically quipped, spooning up the last of his dessert. The guests laughed. Had Glenburn not been producing some of the finest teas in Darjeeling, it wouldn’t have been funny.
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Tourism, however, remains at the mercy of politics, as was demonstrated even before 2013’s monsoon had cleared.
After the beginning of a staggeringly good tourist season, the GJM called a strictly enforced
bandh
on the last day of July that shut down the hills. A month later, an Indian newspaper reported, “The unusually deserted look of the popular mall road of Darjeeling is a testimony to [its
effect on tourism]. Only two of the about seven hundred hotels are partially operating, where media persons are the only inhabitants.”
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The
bandh
was rescinded the day after the piece ran, but the damage for the busy autumn festival season ahead had already been done. Peak tourist season in the hills is during the Puja and Diwali holidays of late October and early November. Most visitors had already canceled.