PRATIK KANJILAL Montek Singh Ahluwalia has developed an uncanny ability to become controversial over peculiar issues. The outrage over pegging the poverty line at an absurd level has scarcely died down, but he has now triggered a silly con
troversy over tea. It owes to a well- meaning gesture at the platinum jubilee celebrations of the Assam Tea Plantersalt39 Association. There, he announced his intention to have tea declared the national drink on the 212th birth anniversary of Maniram Dewan, an early mover on Assam tea and a martyr of the 1857 rising.
Apparently, this has miffed coffee planters down South, the lassi- powered men of Punjab and the teeming millions who survive the summer on the strength of nimbu- pani. They all contend that their preferred drink merits national status. And we still havenalt39t canvassed the sentiments of the Chinese, who are quite possessive about tea. Or the Burmese, who are also players in this game, since tea is believed to have originated in the trijunction between China, Myanmar and Northeastern India. It would be most interesting if this storm in a teacup ruffles the eastern neighbours that we are trying to establish stable relations with, and which can be thought of as the Af- Pak of the east.
But seriously, why should tea be the national drink? It is the beverage of choice across India, but its story is part of the history of India as a colonial chattel.
The Maniram Dewan episode stands out of the narrative like a spike of nationalism but apart from that, the story of tea – both Chinese and Indian – is that of European mercantile imperialism in Asia.
It was European enterprise which changed tea from a luxury with relatively small domestic markets to a multisegment commodity with a global footprint.
It reached Europe via the Portuguese, who were early movers in the colonial game. And the Portuguese infanta Catherine of Braganza took the tea habit over to England when she married Charles II and became the Queen Consort. As part of her dower, she also brought him a few islands clustered around a bay that the Portuguese had named Bom Bahia – alt39 Good Bayalt39. Under English ownership, it blossomed into the metropolis of Bombay. As we see, the story of tea is absolutely central to the colonial discourse.
A tea wave followed in England but in retrospect, one suspects that it did not get its due, unlike the coffee wave which preceded it. Rather daring writers have even attributed the Enlightenment to coffee. The sudden growth of fashionable coffee- houses radically altered the intellectual lives of the English. Had they kept supping the publicans ale in the manner of the ancients, the Age of Reason would never have dawned, it is claimed. Indeed, the first coffee- shops to open in Oxford served as parallel institutions to the university, giving scholars the space to mingle and swap ideas in a way that the campus did not permit.
However, one suspects that the soothing pleasures of tea had a role in sustaining the movement and bringing on the age of science, as the electric charge of caffeine was replaced by the gently invigorating theophylline and theobromine.
Socially, it was tea rather than coffee which formed the basis of middle class English gentility – the porcelain clarity of china, the mysteries of steeping and pouring, the diverting game of reading ones fortune in the leaves in the dregs of the cup. And it is said that the English reveal their national character every time they take a cup – they add cold milk rather than warm, for fear of enjoying themselves too much.
But to return to Ahluwalia, he ended his controversial address by exhorting planters to produce more varieties of tea. There are over 20 varieties of coffee in India, he is reported to have said, but only two of tea – orthodox and CTC. If we are to broaden the culture of tea, perhaps we should focus on this statement – an otherwise urbane man of the world mistakes the two main techniques of production for varieties. Actually, there are eight ma
