Equi-tea: A Tale of Two Worlds

Photo: Manash Chaudhuri

At the peak of dawn, like clockwork, kitchens around the world come alive with the quiet ritual of making a fresh cup of tea, setting the tone for the promise of a new day. For so many, tea is deeply woven into the mundanely beautiful routines of our daily lives. We have tea for our sore throats, teatime to cherish with friends, and an evening cup to relax. Our language even reflects this inherent connection – from “spilling the tea” when we share some gossip to “sipping the tea” when we watch the world unfold before us. But, how often does the average person who brews a cup think about the hands that made the tea?

Shreya Chaudari and her mother talking with Santali (Indigenous) tea workers

The average person in the United States certainly would not, but tea farming is nearly every person’s daily life in Assam, India. Assam is the lifeblood of the tea industry in India, where tea is not an everyday product but a livelihood. I come from a tea-farming family in Assam and am proud to be within the sixth generation of this 200-year-old legacy. When I went to Dibrugarh, Assam (the tea capital of India and the town my family is from) for the first time this past summer for my thesis research, I was surprised to see acre after acre of tea estates. Despite my family history, I never considered how much land it must take to provide tea to both India and the rest of the world. It is easy for me to sit in Berkeley and enjoy my boba made with “high quality, organic, fair trade, single-origin Assam black tea,” but it is another to be the farmers and workers who spend every single day on the land, tending to every plant. The core-periphery model, which is a framework to understand the global supply chain, portrays the divide between the consumers in the Global North and the producers in the Global South. Essentially, the core-periphery model explains the afterlives of colonialism and how they manifest in our daily lives, especially with the heavy overconsumption in the Global North. From our clothes to our furniture, our fruits, and our tea, we unknowingly play into the legacy of colonial power dynamics that shape the lives of people that we may never meet.

Author planting a sacred Ashoka tree. Photo: Manash Chaudari

Within tea, this is very much a reality, and not acknowledging the nuances within the interconnections of our world and our lives can make us complicit in this disparity. In India, tea is an entirely colonial product. Although it would grow wild locally and Indigenous communities sometimes used it within herbal remedies, the plantations and monocrops that had made Assam’s economy dependent on tea were fully introduced by the British in the early 1800s to compete with China’s reigning tea industry. In fact, “English Breakfast Tea” is just a blend of Indian, Sri Lankan, and Kenyan tea.

A primary forest in Assam, part of a protected area for tribal communities, is what the land looks like without disturbance. Photo: Shreya Chaudhuri

Tea is a monocrop, which means that forests were cleared and deprived of biodiversity to make way for acres of land where only tea was forced to grow. Monocropping, a symbol of colonialism, devastates land, environment, people, and culture. The land that is not devastated by monocrops is extremely fertile, as Assam has the perfect climatic conditions for biodiversity – it is wet, tropical, and nutrient-rich. My mom recalls when she was a kid, anytime you had the head of a pineapple, a mango seed, or a branch from a moringa plant, you would simply place it in the soil, and within a few days, a new plant would start there. This is how fertile Assam naturally is, but the land in the tea plantations speaks to a different story of colonial and neocolonial origins, exacerbated by climate change. From my road trips across Assam this summer, I stared in shock at the dichotomy between the rich primary forests and the uniform tea plantations. I felt a sense of loss at how many millions of trees were cut down by the British colonizers, how many thousands of Indians they brought as indentured laborers to toil away on their own motherland. Assam tea is arguably the most labor-intensive tea produced in the world, which is also why it’s considered to be one of the highest quality teas globally. Each tea leaf is carefully hand-picked and selected, a process that is unique to Assam tea. However, the reality is that this premium tea was born from a colonial history of exploitation.

Author and family in front of a temple that her great-great grandfather built

But alongside this turbulent and tragic history, there are also stories of resilience etched in the soil. The tea land of Assam are places of struggle and hope, where the people have always continued to persist as is true for my family’s story. In the 1850s, after a major Indian anti-colonial uprising, my ancestor Harish Bagchi used his savings to buy back land from the British. He was one of the first Indian tea farmers in a time when Indians on the tea farms were only indentured laborers. Bagchi transformed his tea farms by removing indentured status, treating workers with respect, and turning plantations into farms by integrating traditional Indian farming styles. Though my family no longer follows traditional Indian farming practices because of the changes in the land brought by the neocolonial Green Revolution, we still fervently hold on to this anti-colonial dream. My uncle spends every hour he possibly can doing research into how to revive the land and our culture. The farmers are fighting, despite the lack of government support. There are movements to return to our traditional ways and heal from colonial grief. It is a reminder that in the face of oppression, there has always been resistance.

I hope that my story does not deter you from drinking tea. I am not in any way suggesting that we should stop consuming tea in the United States, as that will do more harm than good. Nor am I suggesting to only purchase single-origin organic tea, as even that has its own complexities. Families like mine, who resist corporatized tea, typically do not have funds to ship internationally. We do not have to solve the global supply chain, but perhaps every morning, we can start by taking a moment to honor the hands, land, and labor behind each cup of tea.

RCC National Environment Leadership Fellow — Shreya Chaudhuri — UC Berkeley

Shreya Chaudhuri is a senior at UC Berkeley, majoring in Environmental Science and Geography and minoring in Global Poverty & Practice and Data Science. Her family is from India, so she grew up seeing inequity in environmental impacts which motivated her at an early age to become involved in environmental justice.