The Empire of Tea

INTRODUCTION

This book is written by a tea planter’s widow, Iris, and son, Alan. It has two views and two agendas. The questions behind my writing are described here. Those behind my mother’s work are described in chapter one.

When I started to write this book I had a disparate set of puzzles and memories in my head, like disconnected pieces of a jigsaw. I was born in Shillong, Assam, in 1941, in the centre of the area where tea was first discovered. I have vague memories of my childhood on a tea plantation in Assam, the son of a tea manager. The indistinct memories of wide expanses of tea and driving between them in a Jeep. The smell of the factory, full of piles of tea and ancient churning machines. Of large, cool, bungalows surrounded by beautiful flowers and tended lawns. Of visits to mountain rivers, where I swam and fished and ate cold curries. Of trips to the club to watch polo and play tennis.

All of these memories of the first five years of my life are in fact probably mainly memories from two later trips back to Assam in my teens, after I had gone to boarding school in England. Of these, I particularly remember the shock of Calcutta, with its luxury alongside abysmal poverty. I vowed one day to return to try to improve the lives of those in the awful slums. But of the life of the labourers and servants who hovered on the edge of my privileged childhood and provided the wealth that gave me an expensive education I remember nothing. It probably never occurred to me, young as I was, to speculate about their lives. Neither did I, at that time, wonder about how the tea industry arrived in Assam, why the British were in charge, or even why tea was grown on plantations at all. This book is partly a search for answers to these unasked questions.

In my twenties I tried to return to India to learn more, but was unable to go to Assam for political reasons. So I went to work as an anthropologist in a neighbouring country in the Himalayas, Nepal, and to investigate a similar people, the Gurungs. There I studied the lives of those who, as recruits to the famous Gurkha regiments of the British Army, had helped to guard the tea gardens and their surrounding hills.

My heart was still in Assam, but without the chance of returning there, I pursued a five-year study on the history and culture of the Naga people of the area. This only brought up further puzzles. Why had the British extended their Empire so far up into the northeast? Why had they pushed up into the Naga Hills and with what consequences? My researches circled round the edges of the tea gardens, but only added to the oddness at the heart of the phenomenon, the presence of the tea gardens themselves.

In 1990 I visited Japan, and on this and three subsequent visits I began to try to understand that ancient civilisation as part of my anthropological studies. Among the most striking memories of Japan was the central place of tea in Japanese culture. We were offered it all the time and could see its widespread effects on religion, ceramics and every part of life. Attending several tea ceremonies and visiting teahouses highlighted its extraordinary importance. Trying to understand Japan led me to read books on religion and aesthetics, which suggested that tea is far more than just another hot drink, as I had previously always regarded it. It was seen by the Japanese as a medicine with almost divine properties. There was something special about tea. If it had so much effect on Japanese civilisation, could this also be true elsewhere? Was this part of the reason for the acres of green bushes of my childhood?

All of these half-formed ideas and experiences were in the back of my mind when, in 1993, I began to explore once again the question of the genesis of the Industrial Revolution. An extraordinary, unprecedented, type of civilisation emerged in the west in the eighteenth century. Why did it first emerge in Britain? Why at that time? Why at all?

As we constructed a teahouse in our Cambridgeshire garden during the summer of 1994, and I turned over the puzzles in my mind, I began to ask myself whether the answer could not quite simply lie in the tea bushes of my childhood. Was the solution to be found in the development of tea drinking?

As soon as this occurred to me, it all seemed so obvious. Tea flooded into Britain from the 1730s and spread through much of the population. This occurred just at the point when waterborne disease faded away as a major killer. Boiling water to make the tea would kill off most of the harmful bacteria in the water. It would provide a safe drink for the populace. This might be all that needed to be said.

Yet there were further puzzles. First, all of the Chinese and Japanese authors who wrote of tea, and even the European doctors who investigated it when it first arrived in Europe, were convinced that there was something extra in tea, some beneficial substance betrayed by its bitter taste, an astringent ‘medicine’ which did humans good. If this were true, it would help answer other puzzles – for example, why it was that even infants who were not drinking tea, but being breast-fed, increasingly escaped infant diarrhoea. Could they be being protected by whatever it was that was in the tea and flowed through their mother’s milk? An investigation showed that this was indeed possible, and that the ‘tannin’ of tea is not actually tannin, but a substance called ‘phenolics’ that has powerful antiseptic and antibacterial effects.

This was just one of the jumble of questions in my mind when my mother and I sat down to write this book. How, I also wondered, had tea been discovered? Why should it contain such special properties, in particular caffeine, phenolics and flavonoids? How and why had it spread across the world? How had it become so central to British life? What effects had its production had on those who worked in tea and on their neighbours? What other effects had it had on the civilisations that had adopted it? Were there wider links between the spread of tea and the simultaneous rise of several great civilisations, for instance in China, Japan and Britain? And how far are its supposed health effects likely to be true?

My part of the book is an attempt to fit all these pieces together in a personal exploration of my own past and that of my family, which has for many generations been involved both in tea and in the area around Assam. Also, it is a theoretical exploration of what may turn out to be an important contributor to bringing about the world in which we all live. What started as a tiny set of puzzles and a scarcely-to-be-noticed leaf has ended up in this story as one of the great addictions of history.

ALAN MACFARLANE

CHAPTER 1

MEMOIRS OF A MEMSAHIB

I was brought up with all the colonial claptrap of my kind: that ‘Out There in India’ there were dark people irremediably inferior, who were lucky to be ruled by Us. At the boarding schools to which I was sent I looked with pride at the large part of the world coloured pink. I breathed in from birth the assumption that Orientals were subject races, by definition. There was something called the Indian Mind which was changeless, shared by the entire sub-continent.

Parents, grandparents, uncles and brothers had been Out There and in photos they stood in sepia rows, leaning on rifles or polo sticks or dead tigers, squinting haughtily into the sun. The women lounged in deckchairs on the ship or sat sidesaddle on shiny horses, floppy hats replaced by solar topees. Under the dappled canopy of tropical trees they were serene, since turbaned men held the reins.

Other men hovered around little boys in miniature jodhpurs on the backs of donkeys – there were more servants than relatives in these photographs, standing submissively waiting for orders. Out There, India, was where the men in the family went to join the army; usually becoming officers in the Gurkha regiments whose men were believed to be attached to their white officers to the point of worship. The girls went out to have a good time and then marry. In fact, India was the bin into which was tipped the less than brilliant, the plump, the pimply and the plainly unmarriageable.

Of course we didn’t see it like that – we were brought up to believe that Indians were lucky to have us, that they didn’t know what was good for them until we imposed our intellectual authority over them in the shape of scholars, missionaries, businessmen, soldiers and teachers. Our menfolk were educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, or a similar public school, drilled to be ‘good with natives’. Between 1815 and1914, 85 per cent of the world’s surface was colonised, so there were plenty of natives around, and there were politicians like Balfour booming ‘that they have under us a better government than in the whole history of the world’. Stereotypes abounded and were continually reinforced. Europeans were ‘selfless administrators’ who were ‘natural logicians’ with ‘ingrained intelligence’; white, male, wealthy. Indians were one and all ‘slipshod’ and, except for maharajahs, poor.

With my head stuffed with such nonsense I Went Out in 1938, as to a finishing school, to have my rough edges smoothed and my spare pounds shed, sixteen years old and ready for the long party my mother described Indian life to be. My hope and belief was that after a couple of years I would return to Britain to go to university, slim and self-possessed. My mother, on the other hand, was planning my trousseau from the moment we stepped onto the Strathnaver. India was well supplied with middle-aged men needing wives, not fussy about ‘looks’, maybe even appreciative of my good brain, a terrible handicap in the Jamesean world of matchmaking matriarchs to which she belonged.

The Cantonment in which we lived (my father had seconded from the regular army into the Cantonments Department) was an oasis of tidiness and order in the sprawling muddle around; Indians always lived untidily, it was part of being ‘slipshod’. We were surrounded by white fences, trees were painted white too, and gates and doors – everything was painted and repainted white, perhaps symbolic of the superiority of our colour. We lived in white bungalows around which grew marigolds, petunias and scarlet salvias (I have disliked these ever since) and in the centre of the complex was the Club with tennis courts and a golf course. There was a church and a hospital but no shops; the cook went to the bazaar every morning and my mother wrote down his purchases in her Memsahib’s Account Book. Everything was very cheap but the cook’s figures were daily questioned; Indians were ‘chilarky’, a word that covered lying, cheating and a general (innate of course) inability to resist being saucily devious.

The Cantonment housed a regiment or two, members of the Civil Service, the Police, the Forestry Department, a couple of doctors, the Royal Army Service Corps, which arranged supplies, and, tucked out of sight, some Railway People who were always Coloured and shared an inferior club with Other Ranks. In the hot weather the whole contraption moved up into the hills, except for junior staff and the Railway Riffraff.

In the hills there was a lake, and the Boat Club became the centre of social life, a strict hierarchy being maintained. At the summit, in a house of palatial grandeur, surrounded by hundreds of acres of parkland, was the Governor. In a slightly smaller mansion the General in Charge of Eastern Command sat being rude to anyone who couldn’t respond to his boorish gibes. He employed his son as his ADC and his daughter as his housekeeper. We had to accept invitations from both these grandees; it cemented status, as did the seating arrangements. The Raj was scrupulously snobbish. Doctors from the Indian Medical Association were more respectable than those of the Royal Indian Army Medical Corps and got to sit closer to the Governor or his Lady. I was put down at the bottom of the table next to the ADC who was always a dashing cavalry officer tricked out in gold braid, shiny boots and spurs. The life of tennis parties, golf matches and evening dances was little affected by the outbreak of war that first September soon after my seventeenth birthday, but it put paid to my own hopes of soon returning home. Nobody, however, thought it would last long. We heard on the wireless about Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain and rolled bandages for some possible unspecified local needs. A whole brigade arrived to train, headily filling the Cantonment with young men in uniform. When I was eighteen one of them led me to the altar, to the enormous relief of my mother.

In peacetime he was a tea planter, which was something of a pity since ‘box wallahs’ (businessmen) were almost hoi polloi in my family’s vocabulary, but planters were known to be rich and to live in a remote and peaceful backwater. My mother sent me off happily with a trunkful of toast racks, entrée dishes and Chinese soup bowls to the eastern outpost, where a new regiment was being raised under planter officers to train the hill people of Assam. The Assam Regiment, along with my husband, went in various directions, I went in others, and it was five years and three children later that we started our married life together on a tea garden. I had visualised tea flowering as in an orchard, swathes of sweet-smelling landscape surrounding us and our first settled home. I had absolutely no idea of the process that turned this perfumed profusion into a drink from a pot. I arrived in July 1946 with all my misconceptions in place. I had spent most of the war with my parents, who still wouldn’t – couldn’t – believe in Indian independence. In their circle, Gandhi and Nehru were best behind prison bars. The talk at the Boat Club was of the amusing little processions bearing ‘Quit India’ placards; just children paid a few annas to shout and wave flags. My parents retired with their illusions still about them. I arrived in Assam cocooned like its silkworms in those same illusions.

At twenty-nine, with two years’ planting experience, Mac, my husband took over the management of a large estate so that the couple who had been there through the war could take leave. The Manager’s bungalow was almost as big as the ship, Strathnaver, on which I had sailed to India, and similarly constructed in wood with an upper and lower deck. We lived upstairs; the children rode tricycles round the pillars of the ground floor. In its centre was a locked storeroom. We found the key and discovered it to be packed to the ceiling with food, fridges, sewing machines, spare parts left by the departing Yanks. We filched a couple of tins of ice cream powder but had to wait for the returning Manager to buy off him a fridge and some fans.

Tea turned out to be grown on bushes some distance from the bungalow, and I saw nothing of its plucking or manufacturing. With no car and three children under five I spent my days wiping the sweat from my eyes as I kept them amused and safe. Huge black hornets nested in the ceiling, lizards the size of crocodiles wandered the verandas flicking their tongues; one day I looked down from the top veranda to see a humped bull with spreading horns leaning over the baby’s pram. As gentle as all Brahman bulls he recognised a small creature and went his way. There were probable snakes and possible tigers, but the most deadly creature was the mosquito. I carried a flit gun everywhere.

As prolific as the wild life of brilliant birds, butterflies and animals, was the riot of purple, scarlet, gold, apricot and pearly-white plants. They cascaded and fountained and clambered everywhere, needing little attention from the gardeners (malis) who mowed the acres of grass and then sat in the shade and drank tea out of watering cans. They and the other servants were from the labour lines (living quarters), Mac told me, but to me they were just brown figures who appeared from nowhere and melted back into the same nothingness. They were not as smart as my mother’s servants, who wore starched white coats with coloured cummerbunds held together with shiny brass clasps. They had lived in shacks at the bottom of the garden, called Servants’ Quarters. Having accepted the myth of the Cheating Native, I counted the cigarettes in the silver box on the coffee table and measured the whisky in the decanter. A scruffy lot I thought these garden servants, and wondered if white starched coats would improve them.

I looked forward to getting a car, and after a couple of months this turned up in the shape of an old Hillman Minx from some other ex-Yank scrap heap. It would get us to the club though, and I was excited. The company of toddlers and a largely absent husband was to be enlivened by meeting other planters and their wives. I dressed us all in crisp cottons and we launched ourselves into a steamy afternoon, our first outing for eight weeks. The children sucked their thumbs and dozed grumpily, Mac cursed the wandering cows and potholes. I saw tea for the first time and women bending above it with baskets on their backs. They looked cool and pretty under the shade trees. What a pleasant life, I thought, days drifting like swans on the green sea of tea.

We reached a river and climbed into an open boat, a flimsy affair, but the children woke up to enjoy the slushy bumpy crossing. As my crispness collapsed into damp, bedraggled disarray, I cheered myself with the thought of the club. I pictured polished floors, flower arrangements, chintzy sofas, tea trays and iced drinks carried by servants in white coats and cummerbunds. I thought of a library, a card room, a children’s playroom. I thought in fact of the clubs I had known on the other side of India, where magistrates, forestry officers, policemen had mixed with doctors and colonels to talk of their jobs and hobbies. Their wives sketched a bit, sailed skilfully, were keen gardeners and bridge players. The club for all its petty cliques and established racism was quite a civilised place. There was friendship and laughter and relaxation there.

When we had disembarked and climbed a muddy bank a company car drove us past some bungalows and deposited us beside one slightly bigger, flanked with tennis courts. Inside was a large room, its only furniture a circle of wicker chairs. Opening from it was a bar, and we walked past this out onto the tennis courts. We were to watch tennis, seated on a row of hard chairs, and then the men would retire to play billiards and their own bar. There was nothing for the children to do, no swings or sandpits; in fairness there were no other children. There were no interesting Empire Builders either, nothing but planters, all of a red-faced, thick-legged, sweaty Scottish variety it seemed, a stereotype that remains with me still.

After tennis a dozen women sat in a circle on the wicker chairs; and sat and sat. The children dozed on my lap, the fan ground and squeaked, and the conversation was about servants. There were particular horror stories about the paniwallah, the man who washed up and who never learned and heavens hadn’t one been telling him for years, to take the pot to the kettle. The woman on my right, who said what she didn’t know about running a bungalow in Assam would go on sixpence, kindly shared her deep knowledge about jharans, or dusters. I must give these out every morning and get them back each evening. I must see that each servant got the jharan his status justified – the best to the bearers, any old rags to the sweepers. I must of course lock up food stores in the go-down, a large stone larder that came with most bungalows, and hand out flour and sugar in spoonfuls. The fridge must be locked – watering the milk was a well-known dodge. Did I sew? No? Well in that case I needn’t bother to keep my cotton reels under lock and key, but the silver had to be given lynx-like attention. If any of the pieces started to move round the room be sure that they would gently disappear out of the door one dark night. The amusing thing was to pretend you hadn’t noticed and then pounce at the last moment. Remember that the servants were a pretty primitive race here, not long down from the trees. Like children really, always trying on their tricks, but you had to show them you were master.

After a couple of hours with the children clammily asleep, I said I was going to get my husband. The whole circle froze. It was unheard of for a woman to enter the precincts behind the swing doors where the men had their own bar and from which they would emerge when they were ready. This they did after what seemed like a hundred years, staggering a bit but ready to drive off to their gardens. When we had crossed the river, collected the car and carried the comatose children up the stairs to bed, I leant over the veranda rail and stared down into the compound.

The old man who guarded us, the chowkidar, was wandering up and down with a stick, dressed in a tattered shirt, barefoot. What sort of jharan should I give him? What was he guarding us from anyway? Tigers? Bandits? I knew that as soon as we were asleep he would lay himself down, his head on his turban, and dream the night away. Above his sleeping head the hornets dozed in their hive, snakes lay curled in dry corners, a myriad moths opened and closed their silver wings. The warm night was a humming symphony of sound, the buzzing of insects broken by the clack-clack of frogs, the distant howl of jackals, the beat of drums. It was full of light from fireflies and a canopy of stars, and perfumed with moonflowers and lilies.

I breathed in the sweetness and thought this is the last hot weather I’ll spend in Assam. When we went home on leave next year Mac would get another job and that would be the end of India. There would be no separations from the children, no terrible club circles waiting for the men to come and collect us, their shirts stuck to their pink stomachs, their fly buttons undone. I went to bed happily unaware that I would actually spend twenty years in tea; it would be 1966 before I was carried out on a stretcher from this beautiful, vibrant, exhausting, magical country.

It was ten years before I really started to look around the country. I taught my daughters until the elder was ten, and it was 1955 before I was alone with Assam. I had another ten years before we retired, and I sat on my veranda telling my Journal what I intended to do with my time. Mac was now Manager of a very beautiful tea garden on the edge of the Naga Hills. In the bad old days (of which I knew nothing) the Nagas had raided it, but now they only came down to a market where we bought beads and took photographs. On our fishing trips up a nearby river we watched them laying their bamboo fishtraps, and afterwards they joined us round our campfire, wet and naked. Mac had got particularly fond of them in the army, and in spite of language problems we laughed a lot as we shared our tea and sausages.

Language, my lack of it, was my concern. The labour force spoke so many dialects I was baffled at the thought of choosing one, but I would learn Assamese and go out into the villages to discover the country I had lived in so long and ignorantly. I would also see if I could help in the hospital and school. I knew nothing of the Plantation Act of 1952 with directions about housing, health and education. Mac had shown me the crèche he had built, a