Tea fuels India.
As a life long tea drinker, one thing seemed certain when Jenn and I decided to travel to the sub continent: I would be able to get a decent cup of tea just about anywhere, anytime. I wasn’t disappointed.
After stepping off the plane from Mumbai to Goa at 6am, after 36 hours in transit – three of which where spent sleeping on the floor of the Mumbai airport – I was handed a cup of chai tea by Lisa, mere seconds after getting a hug and kiss from Jenn. I was pretty happy to see all three members of my welcoming committee.
It was the beginning of a delicious love affair: with India, with Jenn all over again, and with a Devine brew called Chai tea.
Some believe that tea is as old as India itself, though the first documentation of the cultivation of tea comes in the Rāmāyaṇa, a Sanskrit epic tale that explores such themes as dharma, duty, and how to become the ideal person, servant, wife, husband or king. Part of the Hindu canon, the Rāmāyaṇa dates to 700 BC. In my world, becoming perfect at anything would involve the consumption of a great many cups of tea.
The first western cultivation of tea in India can be traced to 1837, when the British East Indian Company established the first English tea garden in Chabua, in Upper Assam.
Along with Dejarling and Assam varieties of tea, India is most famous for its Chai Tea brews, which you can purchase in upscale restaurants or from Chai-whalhas on bicycles, in trains, on street corners, or just about everywhere else in the country. On my first night in India, in Hampi -- the imperial capital of The Great Vijayanagar Empire -- a boy not much older than Rio and with a smile as wide as the sunset, offered us no end of opportunities to enjoy a cup of Chai while we watched the day close over ancient ruins and temples. The next night, when Jenn, Lisa and I climbed to the top of a Matunga Hill to watch the sun set from Veerabharda Temple, a man was set up with stove and pots and little stainless steel cups to peddle Chai to pilgrims for ten rupees a glass.
(Jenn took this photo of Chai tea being served from the back of a bike in Fort Cochi)
Chai tea on the train, though, is one of India’s greatest ideas. At irregular intervals men lugging 20 gallon stainless steel urns make their way through the cars; their coming is heralded by the sing-song chant of “chai, chai, chai tea,” and by the pungent aroma of the brews herbs. You get your ten rupees out when you hear that song.
No longer is Chai served on the trains in the legendary ceramic cups that you launch from the window when you are done as a means of stimulating economic activity: now it comes in flimsy plastic cups. But it is, quite simply, the mark of a great civilization that the tea comes to you rather than you having to go to the tea.
Chai tea is a brew of black tea, milk and sugar, along with cinnamon, black pepper corns, ginger, cloves, and cardamom pods. Like laws and sausages, maybe it’s best not to watch too closely at how Chai tea is brewed:
“At a stall men are brewing tea, they put the tea, the milk and the sugar all in together, boil it and strain it through what looks like an old sock. It has an odd taste that grows on you,” says by Quentin Crewe in Letters from India.
(Chai tea being brewed in Cochi: note the old sock....)
The secret, according to some, is in the freshness of the spices. We traveled through some of the countries finest spice growing regions, and witnessed first hand the careful cultivation and sorting of each of these fine plants.
I suppose another secret would be fresh socks.
To enjoy a cup of tea is equal parts flavour and location. To this day I can remember cups of tea I have enjoyed in some magical spots: the ‘breakfast rock’ at Murphy’s Point Provincial Park, for one. Though purchased almost twenty years ago now, I still use the blue and white loon mug I bought that summer in a shop in Smith Falls, Ontario and drank tea from each morning while watching the sun rise and the world come to life from my granite perch overlooking Loon Lake.
Others: Cups of tea brewed on day hikes from a base camp in the Whaleback, in southern Alberta, with my friend Mark Holmes; morning tea in the Stillwater Canyon, in south-eastern Utah.
Now, add to this list possibly my best cup of tea: at a lonely tea stop along the treacherously winding road from Kumily to Munnar, where the cardamom grew tall right along the side of the road. It hadn’t been my best day in India, and I was worn out from the twisting road and the Indian predilection for overtaking diesel-belching Lorries while going uphill on blind corners in an under powered vehicle. The driver stopped to let us have a look around at the cardamom forest and we ordered a cup of Chai from a woman brewing the mix in a dark, concrete bunker on the road side.
It was advertised as ‘cardamom tea’, and it was, beyond a doubt, the best cup of Chai that I had while in India, and possibly the best cup of tea I’ve ever had in my life. She served it in a stout glass and it was thick and creamy and heavenly on the pallet.
(Possibly the best cup of tea I've ever had....)
From this wayward tea stall we carried on to Munnar, home of the Tata Tea Corporation – subsidiary of the Tata group, which is among India’s largest corporations - one of the largest tea conglomerates in the world (in 2000 they bought UK based Tetley Tea, in a nice twist of historic irony). There we stayed in a small but charming resort perched on the side of a steep mountain overlooking tea plantations as far as the eye could see.
Many of us are drawn to pastoral landscapes, and the hills of Munnar are bucolic to the extreme. The hills are voluptuously feminine in their undulating contours; the quilt of tea plants give the landscape a tidy, orderly appearance while the insanely snaking roads provide a sharp contrast to its systematical grids.
below, the view from where we stayed outside of Munnar)
Tea is grown in dense plantations that flow over the hill country like a slightly disjointed lattice. Its beauty is beguiling. Make no mistake: this is agro business at its very best, and very worst. Tea is largely grown in monocultures, and the volume of hardwood forests that must have been clear cut to produce it are staggeringly vast. To its credit, however, tea has very deep tap roots that reportedly do a marvellous job holding the soil intact. Tea is hand picked every ten days or so, and as such, provides solid employment for mostly women of villages like Munnar. Ten million people rely on tea for their livelihood in India. Work on a tea plantation is among the highest paying job in agriculture in the country. That being said, it is a subservient and still barely subsistent existence, as the shanties of Munnar attest. Like all agri-products, it would be best to source organic and fair trade tea to encourage healthy communities and a healthy landscape.
(Shacks in the town of Munnar)
That being said, I never stopped a Chai Whalla on the train to ask if his tea was organic. Thick, rich steaming cups of heaven for the equivalent of a few pennies: who but the most morally righteous could contest such a custom?
And for the record, I never met an Indian man who wore socks.
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