Darjeeling (25 page)

Today, most Darjeeling tea is exported. The majority goes to Europe, and now sales being hit by the Eurozone crisis. “You can't avoid drinking water, but you
can
avoid drinking Darjeeling tea,” said Mukherjee.

After independence, the Indian government began rupee-to-ruble trading with the USSR for machinery and fuel to grease its industrial revolution.
¹⁷
Tea was an important part of the goods that India bartered in exchange.
¹⁸
The concept was not new. The Chinese traded tea with the Tibetans for warhorses as far back as the seventh century, with the Russians for furs from Siberia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then with the British—indirectly—for opium in the nineteenth.

In the spring of 2013, India once again floated the idea of bartering tea for oil, this time with Iran. “Iran used to be the highest paymaster,” said Namring's H. R. Chaudhary, who has been managing in Darjeeling since 1971. “They went for quality, while the Russians, quantity.” Europe and Japan today are, in Chaudhary's phrase, Darjeeling's top paymasters, and Iran may join them, at least in kind, in oil.

It seems more likely, though, that Russia, with its emerging moneyed class, could pay the highest amounts. An October 2013 charity auction in Moscow that offered 1.2-kilogram (2.6-pound) lots of first flush teas from twenty different Darjeeling gardens showed widespread interest. Chamong received $1,076 for one of their lots, but the winning bid went to a Castleton tea for $1,384.
¹⁹

Today
tea planter
is a synonym for
garden manager
or
superintendent
. Though considered the most humble title of the trio, it retains romantic associations.

No one symbolizes that romance in Darjeeling more than Swaraj Kumar “Rajah” Banerjee on Makaibari.
Rajah
means “king” or “prince”; the nickname was earned at Goethals Memorial School, a Catholic boarding school between Kurseong and Darjeeling run by the Irish Christian Brothers, when he led a group of junior boys against senior bullies. The name stuck. Around Darjeeling, he is, by some distance, the most famous man in the business, and it feels appropriate. He has his world record, of course. He's published a glossy book, a documentary has been made about him, and the media make a direct line for Makaibari when looking for a sound bite or television segment on Darjeeling tea. Guests arrive daily, from famous agronomists and foreign tea makers to students.
^*

As he strolls confidently through Makaibari or sits behind his wide desks handling a stream of petitions, the title seems particularly fitting. He cares for the business as well as the aesthetics: he is house manager and head chef. He looks after its vision as well as day-to-day minutiae.

Nearly all of Darjeeling's tea estates are owned by Indian companies that have their headquarters in Kolkata. Some are small, family-run organizations with just a couple of properties in their portfolios. The owners of Glenburn have a single garden in Darjeeling and another in Assam, as is the case with Goomtee and also Jungpana. Selimbong has one in Darjeeling and another in Dooars. The Saria family, which controls Rohini and Gopaldhara, has another pair of tea estates in the Dooars. These tend to be run by multigenerations and passed down through the family.

Darjeeling, though, has, over the last few decades, become dominated by a handful of larger, in some cases global, groups that have been snapping up gardens appearing on the market. The Bagaria Group, with interests in steel, real estate, and wind farms along with tea, has three gardens, including two of the largest in Darjeeling (Phuguri and Gayabaree & Millikthong). The Goodricke Group—part of Camellia Plc UK, one of the last surviving London-controlled tea companies in India—owns eight gardens in Darjeeling, including the preeminent properties of Castleton, Margaret's Hope, Barnesbeg, and Thurbo. (They also have eleven gardens in Assam and another dozen in Dooars.) Jay Shree, part of the industrial conglomerate B. K. Birla Group, which refers to itself as the “First Family of India Inc.,” has twenty-two gardens in India, six of them in Darjeeling, which produce about 11 percent of the area's total output. Ambootia's eleven gardens contribute more than 12 percent of that. Currently the Chamong group is the largest in the area, with thirteen gardens—eleven acquired between 2001 and 2004—that produce around 20 percent of Darjeeling's total tea.

All of these estates are run by managers who live on-site. They might have to decide exactly when the tea should be picked and exactly how it gets processed, but they answer to stakeholders often more concerned with numbers and shorter-term gains.

Yet, while some managers are almost clerks taking orders from the head office in distant Kolkata, this seems to be the exception. Darjeeling's tea planters are different from those elsewhere. To be successful in these hills, they must have deep passion. Even those running an estate for the largest groups care as much for the garden as if it were their own. While most
managers start in the Dooars or Assam—where there are more gardens, more tea, and more job—once they end up at Darjeeling, they stay.

“Other areas don't have the history that Darjeeling has and don't have people who have lived there for more than twenty years,” Vikram Mittal, the owner of Mittal Stores in New Delhi's Sunder Nagar market, said. As a top taster, blender, and merchant specializing in premium Indian teas, he is Sanjay Kapur's (and Aap Ki Pasand's) only real competitor in Delhi. Mittal's father opened the shop in 1954. Originally it sold a hundred items including tea. (Why tea? “The horoscope of my father said he should sell something black.”) Gradually the other products fell away, and in 1978 it became a dedicated tea shop. Mittal Stores' selection is not extensive but is well chosen. Nonetheless, it doesn't fit inside the tiny shop. When it opens in the morning, a pair of assistants cart out large metal tins with tea, cardboard boxes, and sacks of bags and labels, and stack them in front of the shop in order to make room for customers. In the evening, they move it all back inside.

“People who fall in love with this place don't want to go anywhere else,” Mittal observed. “They start interacting with the plants and factory and begin doing amazing things. Many of the people who have been producing good tea in Darjeeling do not have a lot of education but have a fertile mind. Over the years they have learned how, and when, to produce the best tea.” There is no specific teacher-led training, but rather a clear sense of apprenticeship and learning on the ground.

Longevity is a Darjeeling trait. Rajah Banerjee was born on Makaibari and has been working on the estate since 1970. Namring's Chaudhary has been here in the hills for forty-four years and Singbulli's Satish Mantri for twenty-nine. Both men are among a number of Rajasthani planters. Chaudhary's brother is the manager of Lingia. Dhancholia at Marybong is also from Rajasthan, as is Rajesh Pareek on Tukvar. These men arrived in the green of the hills and never left, gaining an intimate knowledge of their garden in order to obtain the finest results from its unique set of materials and microclimate.

B. N. Mudgal personifies this ideal in his twenty-three years on Jungpana and in the isolated nature of the garden to the east of Kurseong. After a bouncing ride down a windy, rough dirt track through Goomtee Tea Estate, the road ends abruptly at a river. A wooden footbridge, slick on misty monsoon mornings, arcs over the tumbling runoff, and a trail heads up 638 uneven, slippery steps embedded in the hillside to the Jungpana factory and offices. The altitude change and climb leave an
unaccustomed visitor's legs rubbery and heart palpitating, sweaty from the hike and the humidity but chilled by the high-elevation breezes.

Everything needs to be carried in by foot, including machinery parts and fuel for the factory as well as well as rice, atta flour, and other food staples. All of the tea is carried out. Every other day, men load wooden chests of tea on their backs, with a wide, steadying trump-line stretched across the forehead, and head down the hill.

For the first decade after independence, the Nepalese royal Rana family owned Jungpana before selling it to its current owners, the Kejriwals, in 1956. The estate's name comes from a legend of a Gorkha called Jung Bahadur, who was mauled by a leopard while hunting with a British sahib. The hunter carried Jung, calling out for
pana
(water), to a stream, where he died. Ever since, the area has been known as the place where Jung took his last drink. “We don't know the facts, but that's what the elderly people on the garden tell us,” said Mudgal.

The south-facing garden is small, having just 73.6 hectares (182 acres) under tea, and spans from 2,900 to 3,300 feet, with a significantly higher-up out section called Mahalderam that ranges from 5,642 to 6,001 feet. The plucked leaves from those fields are loaded into gunnysacks and slid down a steel cable to the factory to be processed—nearly three miles and a three-thousand-foot drop in just six minutes.

Jungpana produces only about 36,000 kilograms (80,000 pounds) of tea a year, a limited but consistently excellent output that is much sought after by clients that include Harrods and Fortnum & Mason in the UK, Mariage Frères and Fauchon in France, and the royal family in Japan. Many experts are calling it Darjeeling's top producer. Once the 2013 season wrapped up, the front page of the
Calcutta Telegraph
proclaimed a new champ takes darjeeling cup.
²⁰
Jungpana had knocked Castleton off its perch as the area's finest tea, the article argued. In the 2014 World Tea Championships held in the USA, Jungpana won the award for top Darjeeling tea.

Wholesale buyers seemed to agree with such judgment. In 2013, from April through the second week of November, the average price Jungpana's tea fetched at auction was Rs 856.33 per kilogram, far more than the next one, Castleton, which went for a third less at Rs 569.15.
²¹

Darjeeling's best tea? “Each tea needs to be approached with an appreciation of its peculiarities and individual characteristics. You really can't compare between a Rembrandt and a Picasso. If my pockets are deep enough, I would buy them all!” Krishan Katyal, the chairman and
managing director of J. Thomas & Co. in Kolkata, is quoted as saying in the
Telegraph
article.

Sanjay Sharma embodies the unsettled young man who ends up in the hills on a tea estate as randomly as his British predecessors, finds a passion when he begins interacting with the leaves, and creates something special.

Still in his early forties, he's young and confident, exceedingly sharp, with both handyman cleverness and book smarts, and, although somewhat wild as a young man, is no rogue. Or at least not completely. His father was one of India's most decorated fighter pilots, an expert on MiGs—he helped bring over the first planes from Russia—who fought in the 1971 war with Pakistan and, for three years, was head flight instructor at the Air Force Academy. He met Sanjay's mother, a nurse, while recuperating in a hospital after a faulty ejection from a jet. Sanjay was educated at St. Mary's High School, an Irish Christian Brothers boarding school in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, and then La Martinière College in Lucknow, finishing at a precocious fifteen. After two years studying at a medical college in Patna, Bihar, he realized the field didn't fully interest him and, at eighteen, transferred to the elite St. Stephens College in Delhi to study literature. Casting about for something to do after graduation, Sanjay landed an interview with a large international tea company that controlled numerous estates.

Of tea he knew almost nothing. The company was looking for OLQ, Sanjay explained using Indian air force jargon, “officer-like qualities.” As in the recruitment ideals at J. Thomas & Co., they were seeking sportsmen. Bright and energetic, he had the ability to lead and the drive to win. They hired him and sent him to work on their Soom Tea Estate.

Sanjay immediately took to the isolated life in the hills, a turn that surprised his friends and fellow Stephanians, who were getting rich in the media and financial worlds, writing books, or entering politics, while he worked as a modest assistant on a tea garden. “As a new assistant manager, you basically know nothing,” he said, walking up through the nursery. Fields of tea rose all around. The morning light caught dozens of greenish spiderwebs strung between tall shade trees that held palm-size golden orb-weavers with striped, yellow-jointed legs. “Technically you're an executive, but even the lowest-paid worker on the estate knows more about tea than you do.” He watched and listened carefully—he quickly picked up
the local language—and was lucky to have had a good head worker who taught him much. Stopping at a covered mound of composted earth, he took a handful and breathed in the humus and loam. “As a planter,” he said, “you have to love the smell of soil.”

In 2001, at twenty-eight years old—the youngest in modern Darjeeling history— Sanjay was named manager of Glenburn when the garden was taken over by new owners. “I jumped the queue,” he quipped, adding with a laugh that this didn't endear him to many at the Planters' Club. Sanjay has a deep and infectious enthusiasm for what he does, and a sense of pride that permeates his undertakings. No matter if he has been up into the late hours of the night, he rises early to check on the factory. He is energetic but has a calm presence and uses a quick and gentle wit to diffuse moments rather than his voice. Things get quietly done. He carries complete authority on the garden, but out of respect rather than fear, and appears extremely well liked by the Gorkhas, with whom he banters in their own language.

“Tea planting, as a profession, is unrivaled in the varied interests it involves,” wrote tea historian William Ukers in the 1930s, “but its greatest attraction lies in the fact that it appeals to the creative instinct in man.”
²²
That appeal remains. Tea planting, Sanjay said, “is unrivaled in scope for creativity. It's endless.”