Tea Plantations, Oral Histories and literary and Historical References: A Collage

Tea for all: The Global Propensity for Consumption and Trade. In the mid 17th century, tea appeared in the written record, as Charles the Second, King of England who received Bombay as dowry, was presented with a tub of tea by the East India Company in 1664. The East India Company’s trade had been in pepper, but when tea was sold in a café it was much appreciated. The tea was shipped by Chinese merchants, and small orders were being placed by 1673(Goodwin 1993:60). Thomas Garroway, the proprietor who first sold tea in his café, had listed 24 disabilities that tea was expected to cure, in 1658. He had described it as useful in all seasons, at all times, and its virtues evident even up to the old age of the consumer (ibid). The production and transport of tea was very much a handicraft and household industry, and its route was complex and difficult, as it travelled to the ports where it was disbursed. Seeing that the Chinese guarded tea very carefully, the East India Company was hard pressed to find a way to export tea bushes to India, where the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks suggested in 1778, that it could be grown in Bihar, Rungpor and Cooch Behar (Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2004:100) In 1792, Banks in the company of Lord Macartney brought back tea seeds and plants for the Calcutta Botanical gardens. In 1816, the plants procured by the representatives of Lord Amherst were lost in transit (ibid 101). Seeing that the Chinese method of curing tea was cumbersome ( dried in the sun, curled by stamping on it like grapes, dried in the sun once more, and then fired in the tea merchants’ furnaces) the British believed that rather than household production variably suited to individual expertise, tea should be produced in plantations, and its preparation mechanized (ibid 105). The production of tea in individual homes in China was cumbersome, but the transportation from tea growing mountains to the Coast was even harder, requiring upto six weeks or two months from Bohea where it was grown to Canton where it was shipped (ibid 106). The labourers were carrying a load of over 150 kgs which was twice their body weight, over mountains, and across rivers, their lives threatened at every point. Millions of households were involved in the production of tea, and there was no possibility of standardization, check over quality and protection from pests. While the labourers transporting it over Tibet were poorly paid and risked their lives, the middlemen charged huge prices and made profits. (ibid 107-108). Silver had been the currency which paid for the tea, but in 1776, America’s independence from Britain meant that the supply of silver from Mexico was cut off, and British agents could not pay for the tea. In 1773, the British snatched away the illegal opium trade to China from the Portuguese, and monopolized the production of opium in India to pay for tea, which latter had increased demand in Britain. The East India Company sold opium to British merchants in India. These traders took it to China, where corrupt officials handled it. The silver that the traders received was sold back to the East India Company which then bought tea. The Opium War devastated China, and the link between Britain feeding the desire for opium and trading in tea was well established (ibid 110, 111). Moving tea production from China to India was the most crucial requirement, as the British saw tea as useful not for themselves alone, but also for their captive populations in India (116). Philip Lutgendorf suggests that it was only in the 1930s that tea was made available to Indians, first to the Bengali bhadralok in Calcutta, who had access to long leaf, and much later to the larger populations who began drinking tea in small vending shops where tea was boiled with milk, sugar and cardamom. In the 1930s, tea prices dropped because of the great depression and 350 million people in British India were to be initiated into drinking tea, as tonnes of tea were now surplus and could not be exported. The advertising campaign began in 1935 and has been described as the largest advertising campaign in Indian history, though Lipton’s Tea had been showcasing their tea as early as 1911 (Lutgendorf 2012:16) Discovery of tea bushes in Assam In Assam, in the early decades of the 19th century, the brothers had married local women, and as traders were on the search for tea. They had discovered wild tea, but the discovery was not followed up by the British government for up to a decade, as Assam was wild forested country and the local communities and borders were rife with conflicts. (Mcfarlane and Mcfarlane 2004: 130). Robert Bruce died, but Charles Bruce continued to look for wild tea in Assam, and in August 1837, more than ten years after the first forays, the Tea Committee was informed by him that the local Guam tribal chief informant had led him to tea bushes, and when the leaves were boiled up, they compared well with Chinese tea (ibid 134). Bruce’s ability to communicate with tribes people was sufficient to persuade them that he would be able to get money to them, if they cleared the jungles, grew tea bushes and prepared the tea for trade purposes. Bruce told the British agents that if he could get the Singhpos to make tea, all of Assam would become a tea garden, and ofcourse the tribal community with their Rajah would clear land at their own expense. In October of 1836, six ‘Chinamen’ had arrived, of whom two were tea men, and six chests of tea were prepared successfully and sent to Calcutta. The Singhpos were ready to clear land at their own pace, but they were too indolent to work at the orders of others, and so also with the Nagas (ibid 136). As a result the Tea Committee representatives suggested that labourers from Chotta Nagpur should be sent in, and once the gardens were set up, capitalists could move in and decide the administration of the gardens (ibid 137). Alan Macfarlane writes, “Stuck in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by jungles full of herds of wild elephants, tigers so plentiful they were referred to as pests like the leeches and rats, far from their families, without women or recreation, with only Singhphos for company, Charles Bruce did well to keep his Chinamen from absconding or collapsing under the strain” (Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2004:137) Creating the experimental tea garden was not easy. In Bruce’s Report of the Agricultural and Historical Society, India Office tracts, no 320 (cited in Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2004: 136) he describes how hardy they are in being transplanted, “I may mention that they were in the first instance plucked out by the roots by the village people who were sent to bring them from their native jungles, put upright into baskets without any earth, brought two days’ journey on men’s backs, put upright into canoes, a little common earth only being thrown among their roots, and were from seven to twenty days before they reached me, and then had to be carried half a day’s journey to the intended new plantation, and were four or five days with only a little moist earth at their roots before they were finally put into the ground; and yet these plants are doing well, at least the greater part of them (ibid 136).” The Chinese method recorded by Charles Bruce was cumbersome. It involved picking the leaves, spreading them in the sun, collecting them, clapping them in gloved hands for ten minutes, leaving them in the sun again, and the whole process repeated three times, till the leaves felt like leather. They were then heated on hot fire, taken out and spread, turned by hand and then back on the fire, and this process repeated three or four times. The leaves were then gathered into small piles and rolled into balls by hand, and then separated by hand. They were not allowed to fall into the fire or on the ground. Then they were left to dry on shelves until they were collected into baskets and placed on fires till they reached the right crispness. Then wearing clean stockings, they packed them into boxes. This was the method the planters used for many years not knowing any other, and learned by Bruce’s men from the ‘Chinamen’ he had gathered together. Still the British felt that the China bushes were better, and it was only in 1839 that the Assam bush was preferred, as the hybrid teas were quite disastrous (ibid 138). And the Assamese simply refused to be exploited, as wages were low, the work long and exhausting, and the seasons with its heat and moistness extreme. As a result, Europeans, Bengalis, tribal communities from Chotta Nagpur, Marwaris, Sikhs came in and this became the composition of the tea gardens. Consequently, the British thought it imperative to initiate factory production of tea in India, and technology was thus introduced for drying, rolling and crushing. Natasha Nongbri suggests that tea plantations were both part of the agricultural complex as well as the industrial system of social relations, and every tea plantation had a tea factory in its compound (Nongbri 2018:9). The Ripple tea factory in Munnar for instance serves its co-operative tea gardeners by sending a Tata van which includes an aircooling system ( a simple rotation fan) that allows the tea from different gardens to be collected without damage so it can reach the factory without bruising the leaf in tropical heat. This is the innovation of Dr Zubin Varghese, who is an innovator with international airconditioning systems. Simple though it is, it helps the tea gardens to optimize the delivery of intact leaves to the factory. In Coonoor, a tea planter told me that since his grandfather was a prominent planter who could not reach the factory in time and was shut out from the curing process of a multinational company which offered its services he started his own factory on his estate, to which tea from even smaller gardens would arrive. Baldeep Singh believes that ‘bought tea’, or tea bought from individual planters with small holdings might be the answer to climate change and obsolete machinery, so that tea factories would (personal communication 19th July 2025). Since tea was an important source of foreign exchange, plantations had been exempted from land redistribution, in the 1950s. The Tea Board took over, and many British owners quickly sold to native aspirants, who had long been ‘middle level staff’ (Lutgendorf 2012:18). Very often, it was to managers from upper echelons of South Indian communities who were Christians known to them with trading backgrounds, or to Marwaris from Calcutta. The Tea Factory The tea factory was a heavy duty ensemble of machines, and often so serviceable as not to be changed for an entire century, as I saw on my visit to Coonoor. Tourists are shown around a tea station’s gardens, horticulture nursery cum shop, eucalyptus oil factory, restaurant and grocery store for high end and everyday needs, and the tea factory itself. The young boys who are employed as tourist guides have finished school have come from Kerala, and are hoping to collect wages to pay college fees after the summer. What is interesting is how boundary crossing and hybrid Tamil culture weave with Kerala’s tea plantation workers, as one parent may be from Tamil Nadu and the other from Kerala. Conversely, workers from Tamil Nadu in Munnar who have been tied to the estate for three generations may marry their mother’s brother’s daughter whom they have known since childhood. In Kerala Tamil workers predominated, generations of them migrating from Coonoor, Kotagiri, and Ooty. In Coonoor, Badagas a tribal or cultivating caste community became tea pluckers, and Tamil workers repatriated from Sri Lanka were rehabilitated by tea planters as they knew the work, feeding into the Tantea plantations. Because of climate change and unseasonal rainfall, boutique teas in advertisement friendly packaging are preferred. Grading the tea is a responsibility that the tea planter must take into account. Clasically the three leaf programme was to have tea pluckers pick only the top two leaves and the budding leaf. That gave the best tea, and was called Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. If the leaf was older it was called Orange Pekoe. If the tea leaf was broken it was called Broken Orange Pekoe. As the productivity of the tea bush declined, or bulk was required, or there was labour shortage, shears were used, and a coarser tea was produced for the mass market. Orange Pekoe was further divided into ‘Fannings’, as this was the tea that could be winnowed, and ‘Dust’ which was swept off factory floors. (Goodwin 1993:182) After it is dried and curled in the big machines, the tea leaves are taken out and allowed to ferment in cool rooms on stone or marble. Then they are allowed to dry again in ovens and further graded, with women workers clearing it of any twigs or fibres, and then once graded, they are packed into chests, boxes or sacks. Lutgendorf describes the cumbersome machine that crushed and fermented teas as ‘prone to breakdowns’. In 1931, a Scotsman called McKercher had invented a CTC (Cut, Tear, Curl) machine that used stainless steel rollers to crush the leaves and ferment (oxidise green tea leaves turning them into black). This machine was then improved by Indians to create the sliding block machine which was used to mass produce ctc so that 99 percent of Indian tea became rolled out in factories by this method (Lutendorf 2012:22). Boutique teas however continued to have a profitable and niche market using old machines as cultural magnets for tourism and export. The Hierarchy of Officers Managers and Assistant Managers report to their employers through written or oral presentations. Sometimes, Managers are asked to take over plantations which are dying, or beyond hope. Baldeep Singh writes of such a garden in his report to his bosses. Tea planters who took over after the British left after the 1960s were sometimes dealing with complex questions of gardens which had passed through other owners. What were the liabilities? As Baldeep Singh writes, it was questions of how to improve yields, consider pest control as fungus, termites and snails were predominant, to improve the production and value of the product (tea), reduce costs and manage labour. Bhatpara, a garden owned by Calcutta marwaris was almost extinct as a production unit, and the Manager had to deal with innumerable problems, as there was indiscipline and anxiety about its development. I paraphrase Baldeep Singh’s report to the owners of the plantation, as given in a report, Since growth on the bushes was very meager, a four year pruning cycle was set in place, from1997/1998 which would have the entire garden covered by 2001/2002. While chemical pesticides were being used, it was hoped that once the pest control was completed, organic fertilizer could be used for the mature bushes. Upto 15 percent of the tea was lost due to pests. From 2003 uprooting of those tea bushes which were above 50 years old was planned. Replanting will produce results only after 12 to 14 years. Irrigation depended on the amicable relation with other managers. Land was stony in patches, in the monsoon the damages to the drains led to problematic flooding, upto 100 hectares was under the control of illegal settlers who had built homes and cultivated the land. When fully utilized the garden could have 800 hectares and produce 26 lakh tonnes of tea. The pluckers unsupervised had been grabbing tea from the bush rather than being selective. They needed to be divided into manageable groups. And these groups had to be allotted to specific sirdars. There had to be clear definition of plucking programme, and the garden administration needed to connect houses to plucking areas with maximum efficiency. Employment of workers had to be within the specific rules of number that could be employed, and “hardship Labour” or those recruited in parallel groups had to be monitored, as they were brought in or managed by influential union leaders. Problems in factory maintenance involved the laying of lights, the substitution of newer machines, and the need to organize transportation of tea by trucks and dependence on external garages. New machinery could be considered only if the profits were sufficient, but measures could be taken to reduce the expense on oil for furnaces. Labour relations between pluckers and management was dismal, as the garden had been neglected by previous owners, and the outcome was that the pluckers depended on highway robbery, animal husbandry and forest produce to survive. Their problems as squatters were real, and once employed, the administration would have to concern itself with housing and water supply. A tubewell commissioned would be available in 2001/2002. Meanwhile the existing tubewells would require to be pumped for 14 hours per day, with its consecutive costs of energy consumption. Housing was the greatest problem, with 519 standard houses for 1327 families. The others live in shacks built from foraging the forests for timber. At 64 units to be constructed, it would take up to 2012, and the rest completed by 2040. Action by the Labour Departments and Plantation Labour Acts was imminent.The repair of houses was done by those workers who were in lesser power for those who were more dominant. The proposed measures were, major repairs in the cold weather for better supervision, closer control of material issues by maintaining records in building registers, repairs to be carried out by permanent workers rather than on contracts, Block Chart of labour maintenance to be kept. The hospital which had once been the best in the district was now in urgent need of repair, and a new Medical Officer to be recruited. The way forward was greater interactive field staff and management, the provision of good environmental and working conditions, and the socialization into computer efficiency by the administrative staff. The improvements in administration of the gardens is because of the hard work of assistant managers, welfare officers and trainees. The Estate’s executives have the total support of their wives, who faced with hard circumstances of living on a neglected garden have proved their strength with the help of those who are from neighbouring gardens. (authored Baldeep Singh, paraphrase of report to managers 15.2. 2000) The Managers and Assistant Managers were frequently transferred from successful gardens to neglected ones, and had to accept their fate starting from scratch when required. Wages were poor for pluckers, and unions were ever active. As a result humanitarian concerns were emotionally a sign of their commitment to human rights issues, but profit margins depended on keeping the price of tea low and wages concomitant to the ratio between cost of production, workers’ wage and profit motives. Role of Women and Corporate Social Responsibility Projects: Alka Singh and the Bodo Weavers Project Local historians are extremely important to the Sociologist, and their views integral to how a narrative is constructed. The role that women played in tea plantations were always substantial, as in lower strata they were pluckers, sorters and packers, besides contributing to the demographic maintenance of labour lines through child bearing, marriage and nurturing. As spouses of managers or assistant managers, women mediated between the house and the gardens. As the wives of the managers were not permitted to go to the lines, their institutional role was to provide support to the medical staff in the hospital or help out in the school or be involved in Corporate Social Responsibility projects. Since amenities such as water, electricity, houses and medical and educational support were provided by the Company to workers, low wages were considered to be legitimate. Unions worked hard to represent the difficulties and poverty of the workers. Since it was a capitalist endeavor with Marwari traders taking over from the colonial British companies, quite often Calcutta traders preferred their names to be kept out of view. Managers’ wives were consolidated in terms of their support to the plantation through the work that they did in unswerving loyalty to their planter husbands. Very few were known to step out of their jurisdiction, but with the emphasis of Corporate Social Responsibility, the wives began to contribute to the well being of the plantation. Alka Singh ran a weaving unit with great proficiency, the products were made by Bodo women, and the linen thus produced was used in the plantation guest houses and hospital. The quality was so good, that it was even bought in Calcutta by social welfare outlets for handlooms. She writes “It is thought that, among the many things introduced to Assam by the Bodo people, was the technique of weaving and embroidery. Each woman is a weaver and every girl is expected to spend atleast a few hours each day working on the family loom. Having acquired weaving knowledge, the women folk use their consummate skills to make intricate and fine fabrics. Besides the designs and colours that denote their tribal identity, the weavers take particular pleasure in using numerous patterns and colours, and allow their own artistic impulses full play. This has the happy consequence of limitless designs and an innovative, playful approach to a burdensome task. The Bodo Handloom Scheme came into being in September 1995 at Borangajuli Tea Estate and was soon followed by similar schemes at Corramore and Dimakusi Tea Estates. The three estates are located in Darrang district, the furthest being Corramore (approximately a four hour drive from Gauhati). The area is backward, with little development. Communication is poor and other than the tea estates, there is little scope for employment. Furthermore, the problem of insurgency plagues this neglected and deprived part of Assam, with all its attendant difficulties. The Scheme was started with a view to providing opportunity to earn a livelihood, to go beyond the boundary of the tea estates and to raise the standard of living of Bodo women whose weaving skills find little scope commercially. What the women lacked was easy access to cotton yarn, lack of finance to purchase the yard where available, steady year long flow of work, and finally a market beyond the confines of the weekly bazaar where, essentially, it is one poor family selling goods to another equally poor one. A few weaving centres have been set up in the vicinity by local entrepreneurs, but work often depends on the needs of a fluctuating and seasonal market and is, as a consequence, inconsistent in terms of livelihood. BHS stepped in to fill these needs. Yarn is procured locally at wholesale rates, and is then dyed near Borangjuli before distribution among the weavers. An office and store for yarn and finished goods has been provided to the Scheme of Borengajuli Tea Estate, and it is here that the weavers gather, twice every week, to collect yarn. Providing yarn free of cost to weavers, who then guided in design, colour combinations, sizes and finish of the products to ensure consistent quality. The weaver takes the yarn to her home, where among her numerous other duties will be the work of weaving for BHS. She will spend only as much time as she can spare on this work, as flexibility is given and allowances are made for sickness, festivals, marriages. Normally, finished goods are brought back within two weeks, sometimes earlier if the weaver’s need for money is urgent. The weaving charges paid are generous and amount to nearly 40% of the total cost. This in itself is unusual in the Handloom sector. Each weaver has been issued a card which she brings with her. The card serves as a brief record of the weaver’s capabilities, her promptness in bringing back woven fabric and her earnings. On the basis of this card, a core group of especially skilled group has each been formed and their particular skills are called upon when new samples are required to be made or when an order is received that requires special care. All yarn is weighed before it is issued, to ensure that wastage stays within acceptable limits and that women contribute handsomely to the household income, some earning as much as their husbands. She is then given more yarn for weaving and the whole process begins again. When the Scheme started, much time went in organising and administering the Scheme. After three years, the systems modified and devised by BHS are now being re-used by the same NGOS whose help had been solicited at the start of the Scheme. From the bolts of fabric that the weavers deliver, a variety of different items are made by the Scheme; we weave table covers of different sizes, napkins to match, table mats, co-ordinated bed cover and curtain fabrics, single and double bedsheets sets. Since traditional Bodo motifs and designs were little known, a conscious decision was earlier taken to make products that have constant and utilitarian appeal. As the Scheme grew and its products acquired a steady market, more ethnic elements were introduced and these have met with approval in the marketplace. Orders have been executed for well known outlets in Calcutta and Bangalore. Samples sent to Delhi and the U.K have elicited enthusiastic response. The Scheme was privileged, this year, to supply linen for the students’ hostel at the prestigious Assam Valley School. Efforts are made to introduce new designs and products regularly. The relationship between the weavers and the Co-ordinators of the Scheme is friendly and interactive. The result being that many new motifs and designs have been added, on the initiative of the weavers themselves, to the large selection of samples that are already being woven here. In the last three years, a number of sales have been organized in Gauhati, initially with the help of well known bodies such as North Eastern Women’s Entrepreneurs’ Association (NEWEA), the Crafts Council of India and at Aavishkar Gallery, in Calcutta. As the response was encouraging, sales have been held with regularity all over Assam. Many of these have been organized by volunteers among the Tea ladies, who worked readily and whose contribution to the overall sales cannot be underestimated. Mention must be made of the generous personal contributions from the Directors of Williamson Magor. Mr and Mrs RL Rikhye were unsparing in their enthusiastic support in procuring orders for the weavers here must also be put on record. The Scheme supplies the hospital linen requirements for most Williamson Magor tea estates in Assam, Dooars and Darjeeling. The inception to the present day, cannot be over-emphasised. The initial capital or seed money was made available by Williamson Magor, interest free, the orders from within the group have provided continuous, steady work to the weavers for over two years now, while infrastructural support from Borengajuli Tea Estate have been vital to the smooth running and well being of BHS. It is matter of pride and happiness for those of us involved in this welfare project that the sales in this financial year were nearly 10 lakhs rupees. The Scheme is now poised for growth both in terms of larger volume of sales as well as diversification. The process of vegetable dyeing of yarn has almost died out in this part of Assam. We are linking up with NGOs activists in this field and hope to send a few weavers from here to participate in workshops to re-learn this process. This is being done with a view to setting up a subsidiary unit for vegetable dyes, which with their huge export potential, could lead to greater monetary benefits and conseqent empowerment of the women weavers. As waste cotton yarn is generated by the scheme, a unit for manufacturing hand made paper can be set up with nominal investment. Both these spin-offs have an identified market niche and little would be required by way of promotion of these products. The Scheme already employs the services of 7 tailors and this number is expected to go up along with sales. Most of the weavers are illiterate and extremely poor. They have no access to any kind of formal financial institutions and almost all government programmes meant for socio economic uplift of the people in this area have failed. Attempts are now being made to organize the weavers into informal Women’s saving and credit groups. Inspiration has been drawn from the success of micro credit groups in other parts of India and an NGO specialising in this fields. Friends of Women’s World Banking (India) has been contacted. This, we hope, will have a ripple effect into other vital fields of health, hygiene and education. The valuable patronage of the Company would help realize the dream to materialize. It is indeed possible that this scheme could grow into a small scale industry that would provide a handsome livelihood to the weavers in Darrang and in the future their nimble fingered daughters as well. Williamson Magor has played a pivotal role in bringing to the forefront the potential, talent and skill that the Bodo women possess, and which till today was little known or recognized beyond the confines of Darrang district.” ( unpublished mimeo Alka Singh, 14.5. 1999) Wives of managers of plantations were brought up in similar class contexts (military or trading families). They were made to understand that setting a table and putting out cutlery in exactly the manner in which their use was prescribed was part of the crucial etiquette that was required of them when entertaining clients at the manager’s bungalow. Servants were many: cooks, bearers, gardeners, ayahs, chauffeurs, chowkidars and each lived with their families on the plantations and were under the care of the Badda Memsahib who also kept cows, dogs, cats and any number of rescued animals and birds, including snakes. Sociability was a life line, so the Managers being in a hierarchy of command were buttressed by the duties of their spouses to those younger in line, whose bachelordom had to be supported by food and advice. When the Assistant Managers married, their young wives had to be initiated into the hard work of cooking for meals at the Club festive occasions. It was rather like feeding a battalion, and the “pathilas” or large copper vessels brought to the club with 25 kilogrammes of chicken, across rivers and rocky roads were like a cross country race, threatened by the presence of jungle animals. Ofcourse, the Burra Memsahib apportioned duties to Assistant Managers’ wives, but the choreography of cooking, transporting and serving the specific tea garden’s contribution rested on the Burra Memsahib. Garden visibility was most necessary, as the planters had to show success in sports, the commercial viability of their tea, and sales there of, while the women represented the manner in which style and social skills along with domestic managerial skills made them partners in the tea industry to their husbands. This visibility of role was something understood, if not paid for or acknowledged. Corporate Social Responsibility was a drive that brought these nurturing and managerial skills to the fore. In Munnar, the Tata co-operative tea factory brought the children of tea pluckers to skills such as strawberry farming, bread and cake making, dyeing and tailoring of upmarket fabrics for sale at the tea station’s outlet. Interestingly, the children at the Bakery were handicapped, or mentally retarded, and had been sent to The Taj in Mumbai to learn from its bakers, bringing back astounding skills in pastry and cake making. The Local Historian and the Craft of Collaging memories Every tea plantation which saw itself as successful, or struggling to survive required to have a history which could be supportive of its continuities. The local historian again provides us with much information. Alka Singh writes, “Lingia was started around 1865 when two sons of German missionaries brought some 550 acres for 600 rupees. Andrew and Fred Wernicke were in their early twenties and while Fred had assisted Captain Jordan at Soom, Andrew was at the neighbouring estate of Tukvar, close to the mission where his parents had worked in the 1840s, when the family first came to Darjeeling. It was at Tukvar that Andre Wernicke met with an unfortunate gun accident that shattered his left hand and wrist. He was taken to Darjeeling the next day where his arm had to be amputated from the elbow. This did not impinge upon his lifestyle and he continued to work and to enjoy the occasional shoot. The land at Lingia was partly jungle and under native cultivation of maize. Work on tea planting had to begin from scratch. The terracing of the steep slopes to prevent erosion was supervised by the two brothers and planting of new tea was from established nurseries or seed at stake. The first tea was planted out by an ex-sergeant whose name is lost to history, around where the Manager’s Bungalow now stands with Fred riding over from Soom to supervise the work. Among the first things that required their immediate attention was the development of a system of roads and bridle paths to facilitate movement of both labour and leaf with in the estate, as well as communication between the warden and the outside world. They connected the mountain streams from nearby jhoras by channels to carry water to the large tank from which it was then conveyed by pipes to the factory to operate the water wheels and at a later date the turbines. By 1867, Fred had left Soom to personally control the work at Lingia, living in a small roughly built bungalow, he watched over the building of the factory and work on the garden. Ever strapped for money, he could not afford cement, corrugated iron, steel girders and beams for the structure of the factory. In true pioneer spirit, Fred improvised and innovated using materials available on the estate: sun dried bricks, foundations of stone and mud. The floors consisted of “sookri”, a composition of quicklime and sand, wood served to make the roof elements and beams. Fred devoted himself to developing Lingia while his brother Andrew managed Makaibari Tea Estate. However, the need for both brothers to be in closer proximity grew, as the neighbouring spur of Tumsong, acquired a few years earlier, began to produce greater quantities of leaf. So, in 1873, Andrew, his wife and children left Makaibari to join Fred at Lingia. Their first winter was spent in the long upstairs withering trough, which ran the length of the factory, and was divided by light partitions into bedrooms, a bathroom, meals being taken downstairs in a room in the factory. The winter of 1873 was a very busy one, for in addition to pushing on with the extension of the Manager’s bungalow, considerable thought and care had to be given in preparing the Lingia tea. When the factory at Lingia was planned, some estimate of the crop it would have to deal with had been made, but such calculations were at best guesswork, as nobody was sure of the full bearing capacity of tea at high altitudes. The Lingia factory could hardly cope with its own crop and as increasing quantities of leaf began pouring in from Tumsong, the need to build a separate factory at Tumsong became urgent. It had also become evident that running Lingia and Tumsong conjointly was both cumbersome and expensive, with a lot of overlapping of work. By the end of 1877, the Tumsong factory and go-downs were functional and the winter of 1878-79 saw Andrew and his family installed at the Manager’s bungalow in Tumsong. Fred who had in 1874 married a Miss Hannah Lindeman remained to look after Lingia. By 1875 or so, people began to realise that Darjeeling teas possessed some thing which was very rare and this is the intrinsic flavor of teas grown at high altitudes. Planters were also beginning to find out how elusive this flavor could be and how easily it was lost by damage to leaf. Attempts were now made to retain the characteristic flavours recognized by names such as lemon, strawberry, muscatel, which so enhanced the value of Darjeeling tea by simplifying and standardizing the process of manufacture. Experiments were already being made with artificial withering on other gardens and the Wernickes would often meet with fellow planters to exchange ideas of information. From 1870 onward, the comparatively simpler routine of withering, rolling, fermenting, firing and sieving adopted at Lingia and other progressive estates gradually became common practice. The break with the centuries old Chinese methods was certainly a brave step. No doubt the brothers would be delighted to learn of the Lingia Clone, a China hybrid stock possessing both high yield and characteristic Darjeeling flavor. The five grades of Lingia teas, picked in locally made wooden boxes lined with paper, were man handled along with other Darjeeling teas as far as Pankhabari and transported to Calcutta by relays of bullock carts. As dacoity and brigandage were common, all convoys travelled under military escort or armed “chaukidars’. Lingia is now a valued possession: a profitable property that supports a population of over 1600 people. Upon the tea bush and upon the people of Lingia are lavished an equal amount of care and attention. In the crisp mountain air, from 6000 at its highest to the comparatively steamier lower reaches at 2,500 Lingia is beautiful: an eloquent tribute to the men who nurtured the estate from it inception in 1865 to the present day.” (unpublished mimeo Alka Singh 2000) When the tea plantation at the Dooars managed by her husband was sold by the Calcutta Marwaris, they moved to Soom and Lingia plantations which allowed them to carry out their humanitarian works among the tea pluckers. Rules of Propriety and the Planter’s Wife What did women who did not adjust to the isolation and tea plantation life do? There were visits to the club, and that too was tied by etiquette and serious rules of comportment. Needless, to say, women were not expected to hang out with men in the bar, and were expected to discuss embroidery and the behavior of servants in segregated groups. Chanda Singh’s novel The Last Boga Sahib (2019) is a fictionalized ethnography of time during the1960s, when a young Scotsman falls in love inappropriately with a woman who was a gym teacher and a friend of his sister in the home country. His mother is against the marriage as they are a third generation British plantation family, and she says the age difference and his solitary life will be a handicap for the young romantic girl who pursues this bachelor living in India, who is known to be obsessed with every day duties. They marry, however, but on reaching Assam, the young woman finds life in the bungalow insufferable and the company of other memsahibs irritating and profoundly out of keeping with her own sense of valour and ‘coming of age’ in times which were so exciting back home. The Scots were still working in tea gardens in the 1960s since payments made to them were in stirling. They left according to Baldeep Singh because that was stopped, and it was not worth their while to be paid in rupees. But they had initiated the Indian representatives of multinational tea companies into their ‘way of life’ which was lavish entertainment, the courtesies of well trained servants who being migrants to Assam or Tamil Nadu were often keen to keep their jobs, and the general pursuit of occupational perfection as a kind of vocation, as well as the sports which made them hardy and competitive, such as football, riding, shooting and cricket. The British themselves, after Independence, found it cheaper to import from Kenya and Malawi, and since the China war in 1962 brought Assam into the firing line there were hardships for the British planters and their families. After nationalization, British companies could only keep 26 percent of the shares, but were happy to have a large internal market in India which got them their profits (Goodwin 1993:167). G.P Baroowah writes of how Anrew Gilis Bowles returned to a tea plantaion he had inherited from his family, as he had been born in Assam and planted tea bushes there, which were very much in demand in the American market. The first thing he does after getting off the plane is visit the grave of Charles Alexander Bruce to whose memory he offered prayers {Barooah 2006:18). In the Last Boga Sahib when the young memsahib cannot adjust, she runs away, sorry to lose her husband, and grateful for his passion and attention but never the less free to marry again after her divorce. The obsessive planter in the fictionalized account of tea planters’ life, which has its centralized tropes the garden, the house, the club, the forest, the hospital and the network of like mind friends returns to his solitary existence with the alcohol, gargantuan meals which his bearers and cooks serve up for him and his friends, and the fear of malaria and sundry tropical diseases against which immunity is sought. David Mitchell writes of his uncle Stuart who was a tea planter in Assam, and then fought in Singapore and died there in the Second World War, against the Japanese as follows, that he recognized, “that on the one hand he had loved being cocooned in a life with servants and staff waiting on his needs. He knew how he reveled in the exotica of such rare sports as pig sticking and hunting, and how he enjoyed the privileged atmosphere of the planters’ clubs. On the other hand he now had to face the immediacy of his solitary return to the limitations and remoteness of a planter’s existence.” (Mitchell 2012: 72) The Englishman had to balance his obsession with tea, with the solitude enjoined on him, and as a result liasons with tea pluckers was looked down upon, but not infrequent. In the case of Stuart, he genuinely fell in love with a tribal woman, who bore him two daughters, one of them posthumously. He had no idea how his family would receive news of their hybrid grand daughters, but on the other hand, on the boat back home, he fell in love with a woman whom he promised to marry as she was from a social class his mother was from, and while in England on that trip, he also connected to hisprevious girlfriends… promiscuity was not a grave offence in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, though it was secretive. He tried very hard to get a job in England, but to no avail. On being forced to return to the plantation knowing full well that he could not marry by company rules for the next four years, he was pleased to see on his return to Assam, that his lover in the plantations was pregnant with their second child. The tragedy of war years, and the intense emotional life of the protagonists continues, as after Stuart’s untimely death in war, his sister’s husband also dies in the war against fascism, leaving behind a steadfast note of love and longing and mutual liberation. On the embers of these war time deaths, do the two cousins Anna, who is the daughter of Stuart, and David who is the son of Stuart’s sister Mary compile their evocative memories. The detailed accounts drawn from letters and hear-say tell us how recapturing the past of these hidden lives in the colonial period, and following it up with post colonial experiences, give us a window into people’s history through the weaving of discordant and often hidden narratives. Stuart’s intense emotions and his feelings for his lover and her children are always hidden from view. On the other hand he circumscribes their joy together as something remembered by those who survived him. He provided for them, and left them land and a home. Much of this emotional segmentalisation would be hidden from view of his intended English wife. Ofcourse, woven in that narrative of the solitary tea planter’s life anticipating marriage with his hypotherical companionate wife, if permitted to arrive by the Company, would be not just Monglee, the tribal lover, but the shadowy and instantaneous attraction for the lovely Isla Black (Mitchell 2012:69). All these loves are repressed and yet, like molten lava they exist waiting to consume him, should they all meet simultaneously. Before that happens, the Second World War conscripts him in 1940. Mary his older child whom he adores, and has memories of him, and Ann, whom he barely meets as an infant are both sent off to a convent school, where inspite of the good intentions of the nuns, Mary dies. Ann hopes to meet her father’s family, but her cousin Daniel dissuades her, as he was head bearer in a planter’s household and knew their ways, “The planters were out and as a special treat Daniel let me sit on the verandah in the big chair that he said my father had sat in. Daniel was clear that in the eyes of my father’s family I would be seen as an embarrassment. He said that they did not want to know children outside marriage. He went on to say that the English did not see the Indian people as equals, and that I would be seen as inferior. I knew all about castes. My life had been spent as an Anglo Indian, not accepted in our village community as either a European or as a true Indian. I saw the caste system everywhere I went and did not question that some people were born to clean latrines and perform other lowly tasks. Somehow I had not applied that thinking to the Europeans on the tea estates but as Daniel spoke to me my dream of acceptance by my father’s family began to fade. (Mitchell 2012: 291-292) As Barooah says, of tea labourers, “They were given shelter, food and clothing but the wage was minimal. They used to toil in the field and on the factory. Any indiscipline was ruthlessly crushed. Labourers were mortally afraid of their boss. Today’s concept of productive partners of progress was unknown then. Labourers coming from the different states of India developed a new culture of integration. Initially these workers were not acceptable to the local population. There was no intermixing between the native population and the newly created agroindustrial force.” (Baroowah 2006: 67; see also Shobhita Jain in Ed. Visvanathan 2001) Bodo insurgence was a vivid response to the rise of ethnic conflict in Assam, as well as of local communities rising against tea managers in the latter years of the 20th century (Jayeeta Sharma 2011, see also L.Lam Khan Piang in Ed Visvanathan 2018) In Chanda Singh’s fictionalized ethnography of tea plantation life in the hands of a last age set of colonial planters, the bride who is brought to Assam, constantly frets about her husband’s possible dalliance with nautch girls who come in for annual festivities. Her husband is thirty five and is discreet about past physical needs but her jealousy eats up their marriage, and the heat and lassitude become over powering obstacles to her staying on. (Singh 2019:109). In breaking all the rules at the club which are prescribed for memsahibs such as drinking overmuch, smoking with the men, dancing non stop with the bachelors, dropping her bath towel at the pool, being rude to the senior ladies, and generally being loudly argumentative with her husband David, Iris communicates her refusal to conform. So Chanda Singh systematically describes what it takes to belong to plantation life, and how conjugal solidarity was the greatest requirement planning a career in tea. In a charming essay written as an introduction for her anthropologist son Alan Macfarlane, Iris writes about her life as a planter’s wife in 1952, “It was full of fireflies and a canopy of stars, 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 county.” (Macfarlane and Macfarlane 2004:9) Iris visits the village school master’s house one afternoon, on her husband’s suggestion, so that she can learn the local language, and is given a delicious lunch by his wife, and returns to the estate glad that she has met Assamese who live a good life outside the tea gardens. “Clutching a bag of guavas I drove home elated. The first scale had fallen from my eyes. Assamese were not the ‘spineless sods’ planters had led me to believe; compared to the labour force in the lines they lived sumptuously. I could visualize retiring to a village shaded by palms, with pumpkins, bananas, coconuts and guavas dropping at my door. Mac, who had pitied me a dreary afternoon of very sweet tea and stilted talk, was surprised at my glowing demeanour. I glowed because I had the key to escape from the club circles, the coffee mornings, the weekend Polo Sprees when the conversation still circled round the paniwallah. In all my years in Assam I never met another woman who wanted to escape. I was considered eccentric, and Mac was pitied. Most of the time I didn’t care. (ibid 12) In the 1950s and 1960s the club in the tea estate didn’t approximate Iris’s view or anticipation of “polished floors, flower arrangements, chintzy sofas, tea trays and iced drinks carried by servants in white coats and cummerbunds... a library, a card room, a children’s playroom…where magistrates, forestry officers, policemen mixed with doctors and colonels and talked of their jobs and hobbies” (ibid 7). So she was horribly disappointed. “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.. 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 sandpit: 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.” (ibid 7) Iris never told Mac that she had found a holy man on an island. He was a large man wrapped in a white shawl, sitting on a platform, and people had to queue to meet him, as only a few were allowed entry at any given time. “What happened next I have remembered for the rest of my life. A hand rested on my bent head, and through it, onto my clammy forehead, into my dusty scalp, right inside my head and then flowing down my body, sweetness and strength filled me. It was like sunshine pouring into a dark room, like rain filling on dry earth. It was as if the windows of my mind had opened and all the beauty of the world flown in.” (ibid 15) Although she never told Mac about the holy man, or returned in person for another blessing, the first meeting was sufficient for her all her life. The passing down of the culture of tea with its material culture which embodied elegance and bourgeoisie values required a new generation of planters, who had to be drawn from the right back ground. This involved being the sons of military officers, or civil servants or people with wealthy agricultural or trade back grounds, able to marry women from the same class who knew the rules of maintaining beautiful homes and gardens and an overladen table and a large retinue of ‘staff ’, as domestic servants were called. They were anglicised and used to the hardship of service to the nation. The routines were rigourous, and the basic rule was that children had to be sent away to boarding schools so that the couple could serve the nation in the production of tea and foreign exchange. The years of hardship of LTTE refugees from Sri Lanka in Tamil Nadu and Bodo insurgency in Assam were occupational hazards that had to be suitably domesticated. Natasha Nongbri writes “Jayeeta Sharma’s work comes closest to examining the foundation of a plantation economy in the regions and assessing its impact in social and cultural terms in the region. Against the backdrop of the emergence of the tea industry that redefined the region and its people (in positive terms for the British) she further explores the transformation of the former service gentry into an assertive Assamese middle class and their attempts and struggles to forge regional linguistic ethnic and nationalistic identities for themselves and their imagined region.”(Nongbri 2018:7) Courage and visibility went together, and the disciplining of labour force on low wages was understood to be the cost of keeping tea prices low for an ever consuming public. References Barooawah, Gautam Prasad. 2006. Tea - Legend, Life and Livelihood of India. Guwahati: LBS Red River Publications Goodwin, Jason 1993 The Gunpowder Gardens – Travels Through India and China In Search of Tea. London: Vintage Jain, Shobhita. 2001. Plantation Labour in South and South East India in Editor Susan Visvanathan, Structure and Transformation: Theory and Society in India Delhi:Oxford University Press Lutgendorf, Philip 2012. Making Tea in India: Chai, capitalism, culture in Thesis 11 113 (1) 11-31 Sage Macfarlane, Alan and Iris Macfarlane. 2004. Green Gold – The Empire of Tea. London: Ebury Press Mitchell, David. 2012. Tea, Love and War: Searching for English Roots in Assam. Leicestershire: Matador Nongbri, Natasha: 2018 The Making of Assam Tea:The Social and Economic History of a Resource, 1830s-1930s unpublished Phd Dissertation submitted to CHS, JNU Piang, L. Lam Khan. 2018. Understanding Ethno-Nationalism through the Concept of Ethnification: The Case of Zo Political Movements in Indo-Myanmar Borderland in Edited Susan Visvanathan, Structure, Innovation and Adaptation, Concepts and Empirical Puzzles In A Post Modern Milieu Delhi Singh, Chanda. 2019. The Last Boga Sahib. Delhi: Speaking Tiger Sharma, Jayeeta. 2011. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. Durham: Duke University Press