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Thursday 4 December 2008

Fading memories of the Raj in the tea gardens of Assam

Richard Orange says the Indian tea industry is enjoying a revival — but that the traditional tea-planters’ way of life, established by the British, is passing into history

There is not much to distinguish Dhanesheva Kurmi from the rest of the crowd at the Hautely Tea Estate, a remote garden an hour and a half’s bumpy drive from the Assamese town of Jorhat.

That life lingered on in Assam long after India’s independence in 1947. Bukhial’s last British owners, the Guthrie family, only sold out in 1987, and when Sandeep started his career as a tea-planter in the 1980s, his visiting agent was a Mr C.D. Smith. John Mackenzie, the last British tea-planter working for Goodricke — which is India’s last significant British-owned tea-growing company — retired in the mid-1980s. At the Jorhat Club the Union flag still hangs forlornly behind the bar and the visitors’ book is crammed with the memories of Englishmen who spent their childhoods on the nearby gardens. One recalls a Christmas Day in the late 1960s when his father, dressed as Santa, landed a small plane on the club’s polo ground to hand out presents.

Arun Singh, Goodricke’s chief executive, argues that the British also established a sense of obligation among planters towards their tea-pickers. ‘Running a tea garden is like running a mini-city,’ he says. ‘You’re responsible for the peoples’ welfare, their births, their deaths.’

British planters uprooted the forefathers of Assam’s 600,000 tea-pickers from their villages far away in Orissa and Bihar, making the workers uniquely reliant on their employers for welfare. ‘That culture hasn’t changed,’ Singh says. ‘The manager is still looked at like a father figure.’

But in others ways the culture is changing, complains Amrit Singh, a Sikh who owns two small estates. ‘Since these Marwaris captured 60 to 70 per cent of the industry, they just started producing as much as they can, and they don’t care about the bushes.’

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