Jump to content

User:Shreya.C123/History of tea in India

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Legend for GPP Course:

[edit]

Legend:

  • plain - original prose
  • bold - my edits
  • italics - my copy edits

Colonial beginnings

[edit]

The British East India Company began large-scale production of tea in Assam, India, in the early 1820s. The first tea crops were of a variety traditionally brewed by the Singpho people[1]. In 1826, the British East India Company took over the region from the Ahom kings through the Yandaboo Treaty. In 1837, the first English tea garden was established at Chabua in Upper Assam; in 1840, the Assam Tea Company was established, and it began the commercial production of tea in the region. Beginning in the 1850s, the tea industry rapidly expanded, consuming vast tracts of land for tea plantations. By the turn of the century, Assam became the leading tea-producing region in the world[2]. Tea became widely grown as a cash crop and a monocrop; scholars have argued that, as such, tea was a means for the British to expand their empire, transforming subsistence farmers into cash croppers, their self-sufficiency into market dependence, and earning profits on their labor[3].

In India, the semi-medicinal use of tea brew is noted in 1662 by Mendelslo:[4]

At our ordinary meetings every day we took only thay, which is commonly used all over the Indies, not only among those of the country, but also among the Dutch and the English, who take it as a drug that cleanses the stomach, and digests the superfluous humours, by a temperate heat particular thereto. —  Indian Food A Historical Companion by Achaya K. T.

In 1689, Ovington records that tea was taken by the banias in Surat without sugar, or mixed with a small quantity of conserved lemons, and that tea with some spices added was used against headache, gravel and gripe. The tea leaves for such use may have come from China. In pre-colonial times in South Asia, tea was used for medicinal purposes and would grow wild; the practice of drinking tea on a daily basis and having it be an aspect of social status was entirely a British colonial concept[5].

While experimenting to introduce tea in India, British colonizers noticed that tea plants with thicker leaves also grew in Assam, and these, when planted in India, responded very well. The same plants had long been cultivated by the Singphos tribe of Assam, and chests of tea supplied by the tribal ruler Ningroola[6]. The Assamese and Chinese varieties have been regarded in the past as different related species, but are now usually classified by botanists as the same species, Camellia sinensis.

The introduction of Chinese tea plants, different from Indian tea, to India is commonly credited to Robert Fortune, who spent about two and a half years, from 1848 to 1851, in China working on behalf of the Royal Horticultural Society of London. Fortune employed many different means to steal tea plants and seedlings, which were regarded as the property of the Chinese empire. He also used Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward's portable Wardian cases to sustain the plants. Using these small greenhouses, Fortune introduced 20,000 tea plants and seedlings to the Darjeeling region of India, on steep slopes in the foothills of the Himalayas, with the acid soil liked by Camellia plants. He also brought a group of trained Chinese tea workers who would facilitate the production of tea leaves. With the exception of a few plants which survived in established Indian gardens, most of the Chinese tea plants Fortune introduced to India perished. The technology and knowledge that was brought over from China was instrumental in the later flourishing of the Indian tea industry using Chinese varieties, especially Darjeeling tea, which continues to use Chinese strains.

The colonial tea industry was founded on indentured laborers. The British kidnapped these laborers and forced them to work on the tea plantations for little or no pay, a practice which earned them the name “coolie catchers”[7]. This especially impacted women, as tea cutting was seen as “women’s work” though they received less pay despite being coerced into producing more[7]. Writer Mulk Raj Anand described the British tea industry as: “The hunger, the sweat and the despair of a million Indians!”[8]  

From the first, Indian-grown tea proved extremely popular in Britain, both for its greater strength, and as a colonial product of the empire. Tea had been a high-status drink when first introduced, but had steadily fallen in price and increased in popularity among the working class. The Temperance movement massively promoted tea-drinking, from the early 19thC on, as an alternative to beer – water being of dubious quality, but the complete boiling necessary for tea rendering it safe. Many men in particular found China tea insipid, and the greater strength and lower price of Indian teas appealed greatly. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, big brands such as Lyons, Liptons and Mazawattee dominated the market. Tea was the dominant drink for all classes during the Victorian era, working-class families often doing without other foods in order to afford it. This meant the potential market for Indian teas was vast. Indian tea (effectively including Ceylon tea from Sri Lanka) soon came to be the "norm", with China tea a minority taste. Until the 1970s and the rise of instant coffee, Indian tea had almost sole command of the hot drinks market. Its rivals were cocoa, coffee and savoury drinks such as Bovril and Oxo. In recent decades, Asian tea has lost much ground in the cheaper end of European markets to tea from Africa, especially Kenyan tea.

Modern tea industry

[edit]

India's tea industry is the fourth largest in the world, producing $709,000,000 worth of tea[9]. As of 2013 the consumption of green tea in India was growing by over 50% a year[10]. The major tea-producing states in India are: Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu,Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Sikkim, Nagaland, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Mizoram and Meghalaya.

The expansion of the tea industry since the early 2000s has come at enormous cost to the local communities, farmers, and the land[11]. Corporations like Tetley, Typhoo, Camellia, TATA, Unilever, Taj[12], and others have been buying out small tea growers and family-run farms. Their tea production has followed Green Revolution methods, putting growth and profit over the lives of cultivators and the health of the soil. The term "neoliberal corporatization" has been used to describe these methods[13]. Although by the 1980s, tea farms and most of the agricultural land were owned by Indians who took over the British plantations post-independence, Western and Green Revolution influences shifted the tea industry from smaller farms to large corporations. Indian-owned tea corporations are supported by the World Bank and the IMF[11].

India’s tea industry is a lucrative business, and there is especially a global demand for Assam black tea. For example, since 2006, the TATA corporation has been buying up small farms in Assam with the support of a $7 billion investment from the World Bank[14]. By 2010, they owned 24 farms in Assam and Northeast India[15]. TATA has several workers' rights abuse allegations against them, as they do not have protective measures for their farmers when spraying chemicals, they pay low wages, and demand long working hours[16]. In 2014, TATA’s tea company was in the news for worker’s rights abuses and trafficking of young girls[17]. The present-day tea industry in India is growing increasingly dominated by corporations to meet global demands[18].

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Gokhale, Nitin A. (1998). The hot brew: the Assam tea industry's most turbulent decade. Guwahati: Spectrum Publications : Distributors, United Publishers (published 2005). ISBN 978-81-85319-82-7.
  2. ^ "India Together: Long disenfranchised, and struggling for ST status - 05 May 2008". indiatogether.org. 2008-05-05. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  3. ^ Arora, Nayantara (2023-03-13). "Chai as a Colonial Creation: The British Empire's Cultivation of Tea as a Popular Taste and Habit Among South Asians". Oregon Research Journal. doi:10.5399/uo/ourj/21.1.7. ISSN 2160-617X.
  4. ^ Wheeler, James Talboys (1878). Early Records of British India: A History of the English Settlements in India, as Told in the Government Records, the Works of Old Travellers and Other Contemporary Documents, from the Earliest Period Down to the Rise of British Power in India. Trübner.
  5. ^ Hazam, Miazi (2022), Behera, Maguni Charan (ed.), "Understanding Socio-economic Subjugation by the British in Mulk Raj Anand's Two Leaves and a Bud", Tribe, Space and Mobilisation: Colonial Dynamics and Post-Colonial Dilemma in Tribal Studies, Singapore: Springer, pp. 351–361, doi:10.1007/978-981-19-0059-4_19, ISBN 978-981-19-0059-4, retrieved 2024-05-10
  6. ^ Achaya, Konganda T. (1998). Indian food: a historical companion. Oxford India paperbacks. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-564416-6.
  7. ^ a b Varma, Nitin (2005). "Coolie Acts and the Acting Coolies: Coolie, Planter and State in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Colonial Tea Plantations of Assam". Social Scientist. 33 (5/6): 49–72. ISSN 0970-0293.
  8. ^ Hazam, Miazi (2022), Behera, Maguni Charan (ed.), "Understanding Socio-economic Subjugation by the British in Mulk Raj Anand's Two Leaves and a Bud", Tribe, Space and Mobilisation: Colonial Dynamics and Post-Colonial Dilemma in Tribal Studies, Singapore: Springer, pp. 351–361, doi:10.1007/978-981-19-0059-4_19, ISBN 978-981-19-0059-4, retrieved 2024-04-24
  9. ^ "Tea in India". The Observatory of Economic Complexity. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  10. ^ "Tata Global Beverages taps into growing green tea culture". BusinessLine. 2013-02-01. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  11. ^ a b Human Rights Institute (2014-01-01). ""The More Things Change ...": The World Bank, Tata and Enduring Abuses on India's Tea Plantation". Human Rights Institute.
  12. ^ Sharma, Chandan Kumar; Barua, Prarthana. "Small Tea Plantation and Its Impact on the Rural Landscape of Contemporary Assam". International Journal of Rural Management. 13 (2): 140–161. doi:10.1177/0973005217725454. ISSN 0973-0052.
  13. ^ Shiva, Vandana (2016). The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. University Press of Kentucky.
  14. ^ "World Bank Group: India Tea Investment Tramples Rights | Human Rights Watch". 2016-11-08. Retrieved 2024-05-10.
  15. ^ Rosenblum, Peter (2017). "The World Bank, the Tata Conglomerate and Tea Workers in India". International Union Rights. 24 (1): 8–10. ISSN 2308-5142.
  16. ^ Human Rights Institute (2014-01-01). ""The More Things Change ...": The World Bank, Tata and Enduring Abuses on India's Tea Plantation". Human Rights Institute.
  17. ^ Chamberlain, Gethin; Sonitpur, Gethin Chamberlain; Assam (2014-03-01). "India's tea firms urged to act on slave trafficking after girls freed". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-05-10.
  18. ^ Das, Phulmoni; Hazarika, Robin (2022-12-12). "Claiming Land Rights: Politics of Space and Identity—A Study of the Tea Garden Community of Assam". Contemporary Voice of Dalit: 2455328X2211372. doi:10.1177/2455328X221137236. ISSN 2455-328X.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Shreya.C123/History_of_tea_in_India&oldid=1223138041"