The United Nations General Assembly decided to designate 21 May as International Tea Day to “promote and foster collective actions to implement activities in favour of the sustainable production and consumption of tea and raise awareness of its importance in fighting hunger and poverty”.
It is ironic that a body, the structure of which still reflects a geopolitical landscape of the mid-twentieth century, directs how a primarily colonial enterprise of tea growing should be celebrated in formerly colonised countries.
While tea has been indigenous to Assam for centuries, the story of the advent of systematic tea cultivation by the British East India Company started in 1837, with the first batch auctioned in 1839 in London.
Indeed, it was the boom in global tea trade in the mid-nineteenth century that the name Assam became synonymous with tea and this very factor was responsible for thwarting the valley being renamed the Northeast Provinces.
With the burgeoning enterprise in tea, the life of a handful of English planter class improved tremendously and this was reflected in the decadent lifestyle they recreated replete with bungalows surrounded by sprawling gardens, tennis clubs and horse racing tracks.
At the same time, the condition of the Assamese peasants deteriorated. Made landless by the expanding tea plantations, sidelined by skewed land taxation policies that favoured the wealthy, and exploited by unscrupulous money lenders, the locals could not even sustain their subsistence rice cultivation.
Denied alternate livelihoods in the plantations by the colonisers who considered them to be ‘unfit for labour’, they saw themselves even more marginalised by the large-scale import of labour from poverty-stricken areas outside the region. The local population dwindled in the late nineteenth century, made worse by an epidemic and a historic earthquake. Sadly, the state of affairs did not improve post-independence with many of the exploitative policies perpetuated by the government of a free India.
Fast forward 187 years to today. The colonisers have long gone, but their legacy endures. Tea exports constitute about 68% of the state’s total exports and a substantial portion of the earnings support local employment, infrastructure, and social welfare initiatives. Despite these investments, a considerable amount of profit flows outside the state, primarily to large corporations headquartered elsewhere.
However, one can see glimmers of hope. Small Tea Growers today contribute to 52% of the total tea output in the region, generating livelihoods for thousands of households. They are carving a niche for themselves in producing boutique tea varieties and seem to be adapting well to the changing global trends in tea consumption.
Alongside this, the plantation workers or ‘baganias’, although still poor and marginalised, are slowly becoming a part of the syncretic culture that is Assamese.
So, as we designate a day each year to celebrate our vibrant tea culture, could we also pause a moment to reflect on the memories of a time when the people of Assam and imported labourers had to endure such unthinkable oppression that it severed their ties to their land and identity and catapulted them into a future of dependency and subjugation?
(The author is the Founding Director of PlaceMaking Foundation, a section 8 non-profit focused on co-creating healthy and dignified public places. The pre-colonial narrative in the article has been informed by the book “Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India” by Yasmin Saikia.)
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