From medicine to beverage

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism …. a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

— Kakuzo Okakura, in The Book of Tea

IN life one might think of tea all the time, but if you think of a book on tea, what comes instantly to mind is the classic work from which the above passage is taken. For even as it speaks of tea and the role it plays in the life of millions of people, it sings and soars, touching now upon its history, now upon philosophy, now on politics — to be exact, the politics of culture and the culture of politics — above all, upon the beauty of the Japanese tea ceremony and the lessons that are embedded in it. Tea and Okakura become one in the reader’s mind.

A view of a tea garden in the Munnar region. Advertisement A share certificate of the Assam Tea Company. Issued in 1839

But what also come to mind, rising from the layers of memory, are statements, advertising slogans, even snippets of poetry, all related to tea. Who can forget, for instance, the catchy line which used to feature on posters everywhere, at railway stations, at bus stands, in newspapers: "garmiyaon mein garam chai thandak pahunchaati hai" (Even in the heat of summer, hot tea cools)? Clearly those were the days when the idea of tea — not a specific brand — was being sold across the land. Nor is it easy to forget that impish couplet on tea which used once to do the rounds of colleges: "Ek dosheeza key honton ki tareh/ iss mein garmi bhi hai, mithaas bhi hai" (Much like the lips of a beauteous maid, it is hot, and it is sweet). A passion for tea had settled down in many minds, including that of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, that great leader of the Freedom Movement, whose one request, while he was in prison, used to be that tea be not denied to him. It was he, a true connoisseur of the beverage, who began one of his inimitable essays with the words: "Chai ek nihaayat umda cheez hai jisey zara sa doodh daal kar kharaab kiya ja sakta hai", meaning: ‘Tea is a wonderful thing which can however be ruined by the slightest addition of milk to it’.

All these recollections, I need to add, are occasioned by my having chanced upon a recent book, CHAI: The Experience of Indian Tea: "a pictorial journey through time into the heartlands of tea", as it is described. Clearly, the two authors who collaborated on it — Rekha Sarin and Rajan Kapoor — are enthusiastic about tea: aficionados, if one so likes. In the course of putting this book together, they have become ‘ardent admirers’ of the beverage, as they say.

An early poster of Indian tea for the French market.

Holding the cup in their hands "with reverence", they establish for the reader, first, what tea means to Indians: from householders to sadhus, from elegantly dressed ladies to plumbers and carpenters; how it grows in our land from Assam and Darjeeling to the Nilgiris, from the Terai to the Kangra valley; and how it is served everywhere, from roadside dhabas to tea-lounges in sophisticated hotels. But along with that comes a lot of information: how tea was known very early to the tribals of the northeast, how the British made valiant, and eventually successful, efforts to grow it in India instead of importing it from China. There are ‘documents’ that one sees: the gravestone of Charles Bruce who first delivered specimens of tea from the North-East to botanical experts in Calcutta, the first share certificate of the Assam Tea Company that was established in 1839, a painting of Maniram Dutta Barua who ‘dared’ challenge the monopoly that the East India Company and its agents were setting up, and paid for it with his life, so to speak.

There is much else. We get to know how the great tea estates of yesterday and today got established; what the tea planter’s daily life is like; how tea is dried, weighed, sorted, graded, processed; how tea tasters work, and so on. There are things that one had always wanted to know: the grades of tea, for instance, from Pekoe through Orange Pekoe and Flowery Orange Pekoe all the way up to Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, the first consisting of leaves with no golden tips and the last with delicate yellow tips at the end of the top bud. But there are also things that one did not necessarily want to know about: stock pictures of sailing ships, for instance; heritage post boxes in Darjeeling, shots of the Kumbh Mela, the interior of the Chennakeshava Temple in Karnataka, and the like.

But then, suddenly, the book takes a surprise and delectable turn towards the end, for a whole section on recipes with tea is introduced here: masala chai, Kashmiri kahwa, grandma’s chai for cough and cold; but also — product placement? — tea innovations from the Imperial Hotel in Delhi: thus, blood-orange ice tea, citrus delight, and the like. This is not what Okakura might have done in his Book of Tea, but then, the times have moved on.