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History of Tea in India | About Our Time | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: History of Tea in India
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Indian streets are paved with gold.
Liquid gold.
No matter where you go, from the high peaks of Ladhakh to remotest parts of Andamans,
you will find this one golden beverage, this elixir of pure refreshment.
Everywhere you go in India you can find Tea.
Well when I say tea, what I mean is chai - boiled water with the leaves of the tea plant - camelia
sinenses, usually with milk and sugar.
Not only is it the staple beverage in households across the country, offices and commercial
areas have dedicated tea vendors, who in turn don't even come close enough to fulfilling
the demand.
So you and everyone you know has that one chaiwala who makes just the perfect tea.
India in short is run on chai.
But rewind the clock by a mere 100 years and tea had not the popularity it enjoys today.
So how did chai get so popular?
Let's find out
According to a 2017 study that appeared in "Frontiers in Plant Science",
there are 3 possible sites where the humans generally began to use and grow tea purposefully
And they are all around this area - Southern China, Yunnan Province of China, and Assam
in India.
However, the earliest written records we have indicate that tea started being used as a
medicine extensively in China nearly 5000 years ago.
When Buddhism came to China, tea, due to its healthful benefits, became a part of the Chinese
daily life.
And as the religion spread along the Silk Road, so did tea, which was now a part of
Buddhist ceremonies.
Tea was happily spreading peace and alertness throughout Asia, when in came the Europeans,
with their fancy ships and trade deals.
While India traded mostly in spices and ivory, China traded porcelain, its own spices and
tea.
Portugal was the first of the Old World to reach the Far East and started drinking tea,
but when the Dutch came next, they were so impressed, that they created permanent stations
in Java (Indonesia) for the purpose of importing tea.
They were also the first to create a habit of daily tea drinking.
And from the Dutch, tea drinking spread to the high society of mainland Europe - France,
Germany and Scandinavia.
This was also the time when Europeans started adding milk to their tea.
No one exactly knows why.. maybe not to stain their expensive porcelain?
In the year 1658 Dutch-bought tea was first sold in London, advertising its miraculous
health benefits.
And all of the British high-society went mad for this drink.
Now the tea in England was similar to the European milk tea, but they also added sugar
that they were importing from West Indies.
This further boosted the popularity of tea.
It started being available in coffeehouses across England along with coffee and hot chocolate.
In 1662 King Charles the II married Princess Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess
and an avid tea drinker.
This made tea a fashionable trend with the English ladies and led to the creation of
a social event known as 'teatime', which interestingly still exists in various colonial hangovers
- like the sport of Cricket.
Now, tea was in such high demand in England, that the Crown wanted to trade directly with
China.
But at the time, the Dutch were the strongest of seafaring nations, and so they restricted
England to only opening trading stations in India - they did not allow them to directly
trade with China.
The Crown made a few rich merchants responsible for these trading stations in India.
They called themselves the Levant Group and formed a company called the the John Company,
or on papers the British East India Company.
Although the British East India Company later was able to directly trade with the Chinese,
the increasing amount of competition was making them desperate to look for a cheaper source
of tea.
The Chinese at that time considered foreigners as barbarians and would not let anyone inside
the country - but we will come back to this later.
England, on the other hand understanding that the continuing high demand mean huge profits
for the future, were driven to try and use the land they had newly conquered - India.
Now for many years, there had been rumors of local Singpo tribes in Northeast Assam
eating tea leaves as picked vegetable.
In 1823, an English explorer - Major Robert Bruce went on an expedition to that region
and found out the rumors to be true.
There were wild tea leaves growing in Assam, which were being used both as a vegetable
and in beverages for centuries.
However, when he brought the seeds and plants back to Calcutta, the English researchers
could not properly identify the Assam tea bush, because they thought only the China tea bush
can be called tea and stopped any further investigation.
Now back in Europe the demand for tea kept rising.
The British East India Company was dependent solely on China for its tea and so great was
the amount of silver being paid to the Chinese traders, that the English almost ran out of
silver.
And to add to the problems, the Chinese refused the British East India Company's monopoly to trade,
so trading from China got very very competitive.
To solve this, England came up with a plan.
A plan to exchange addictions.
Chinese Tea for Indian Opium.
They flooded the Chinese market with Opium grown in Bengal.
The Chinese became addicted to the drug and its demand was big enough to offset the money
England lost in buying tea.
This also led to the Opium Wars, which is a story for another time.
But England wanted to fully control the manufacture and import of tea.
With that in mind they created the India Tea Committee.
In the beginning the Committee kept choosing wrong locations and wrong tea bushes - ignoring
the Assam bush and insisting on China bush - not understanding the lower temperature
and higher altitude requirements of the China bush.
And so they failed again and again.
As mentioned before, the Chinese did not let anyone in the country, and so their methods
of tea manufacture were largely a secret.
But that was before the great theft.
In 1848, a botanist from Scotland, Robert Fortune, went to China disguised as a Chinese
merchant and brought back to India - tea seeds, tea leaf samples, knowledge of manufacturing
both black and green teas, and also, wait for it, 80 Chinese tea specialists who started
working on tea gardens in India.
Good god!
The samples were planted in Darjeeling and Assam.
Now, because of Darjeeling's low temperatures and high attitude the China bush was somewhat
successful.
But Assam's lower elevation and warm and humid climate caused the tea to fail.
The Tea Committee then researched the Assam problem carefully and finally identified the
Assam bush as different from the China bush.
They started the process of taming the wild tea bushes of Assam, applying methods learned
from the great theft.
This proved to be a massive success - the Indian tea was deemed better in quality than
the China tea and the Assam bush replaced the China bush in India.
And so began the tea industry in Assam.
The tea bush was later also planted in the Nilgiris in south India and Kangra Valley
in Himachal Pradesh.
Within 50 years England was fully in control of their tea import.
In the year 1900, about 75 million kilograms of tea was supplied from India to England.
The Chinese tea import on the other hand fell from 90% to only 5% as India grew to be the
world leader in tea manufacture.
Now during these early stages of the English setting up the tea industry in India, the
local customers were mostly the English imperial citizens, and some in the Indian high-society.
And so the early tea ads were largely targeted towards them.
But with the opening of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway in 1880s, tea started making inroads
to all parts of the country, and India itself emerged as a big tea market.
But, it was only after the first world war, in the 1920s, that the status of tea as we
know it today began taking shape.
Railway Stations all across India - from Bengal to Punjab - were the first places where tea
vendors set up their shops with stoves and kettles to sell tea.
It was also when the tea companies started an educational propaganda.
Large hoardings and boards showing how to make tea in local languages were put up in
public spaces, demonstration events were held, where the people were shown how to make tea
at home, and they were given this healthy and delicious drink free of cost.
Tea was now heavily advertised to all sections of Indian society.
It was necessary to start your day with a cup of tea.
Breakfast was said to be incomplete without a cup of hot chai.
And to make the tea even more energizing and enticing, even more milk and sugar were added.
When tea finally reached common people's home, they added their own ingredients to keep up
with their own preferences.
Ginger, cardamom, and other spices were added according to their taste and medicinal values.
And from a few shops and stalls in the 1920s, tea vendors started booming in the 1930s in
every major city, and they reached all of India by the 1950s.
But chai did have some problems in south India, where the urban middle class was obsessed
with coffee.
It did finally break through and started being served in hotels and coffee clubs.
In the 1940s, before independence, tea ads changed to reflect the swadeshi movement and
started representing different peoples and different parts of the country.
After independence, tea became India's largest industry and the biggest foreign exchange
earner.
A picture of a united Indian nation started to emerge and it was a nation that united
over a cup of tea.
This ad for example - shows how 10 members of a joint-family hold completely different
views but come together and negotiate them over a cup of tea.
Tea was the binding force keeping together the family and the nation.
Through ad campaigns and further decrease in prices, tea became the national drink of
India.
All classes and sections of the society were hooked onto this beverage.
In subsequent decades, tea started to appear as a subject of the newly popular art of photography,
it also started showing up in popular national and regional movies, and it became the center
of socializing and "getting together for gossip" culture.
On the other hand more and more ads began relating tea with art and showing it as a
necessary tool in one's creative and artistic pursuit.
In India, tea is available in small-town railway stations, in five-star hotels and everywhere
in between.
You can find a chaiwala on highways, city streets or
on small narrow roads.
Anyone who has been woken up by the chai-chai-chai of tea sellers inside a train compartment,
knows how ingrained tea is with the daily life of the country.
In its past, it has led to wars and rebellions, and today functions as a part of a united
nation and an ever growing industry.
The benefits of these leaves are well documented and well researched.
So why don't you sit back, relax and have a cup of tea.
Hello internet.
Let me know if you liked the video in the comments below.
I will making more videos on things that interest me about India, so please subscribe to stay
updated.
Thanks for watching.
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