A Tarnished Tea Service

The cup that cheers masks not a little suffering, writes AJAY SINGH

Mention the words ‘‘tea plantation’’ and the imaginations of Asians and Westerners alike turn to long stretches of greenery, luxurious bungalows with plenty of servants and private gardens larger than a football field. People are always fascinated when I tell them that I once worked on one. ‘‘Ah,’’ they swoon, ‘‘what was that like?’’
It’s an answer many don’t want to hear. A career in the tea plantations has lost much of its charm since the departure of the British, who brought to India from China not just the tea bush but also the lucrative industry that makes possible your ‘‘morning cuppa.’’ Time was when people became planters to experience one of the finest careers outdoors in modern times. They were fresh out of school, their only qualifications a distaste for desk jobs and a good family background. Those days are gone now.

Still, not everything was pleasant about the good old days. Tea production, always a labour-intensive industry, was at least partly sustained by labourers living in slave-like conditions. In southern India’s Tamil Nadu state, where I was a tea planter in the 1980s, most major estates have a rich history of slavery. During the 19th century, British planters lured to their fields thousands of low-caste peasants, most of them from a single district, Salem, by offering them work on attractive terms. Once the labourers arrived at the plantations they were forced by day to work under the most inhuman conditions. At night they were locked up like animals so they wouldn’t escape. Go to a tea estate in Tamil Nadu or neighbouring Kerala and you will likely find the descendants of these slaves of the British Raj plucking tea leaves or pruning tea bushes. They are the drones of the tea industry, its unsung heroes.

The stereotypical image of a plantation manager in pre-Independence India was of a haughty man on horseback flogging ‘recalcitrant’ workers with a whip. Not a few Indian managers of today’s tea plantations yearn to do the same. Managers resort to a number of alternative tactics employed by the old colonial masters — shouting, chief among them. Even today, in the age of the Internet and progressivism, a tough manager is one who can shout so loudly that his workers tremble. Such a manager is referred to as ‘a terror,’ an epithet widely regarded as a badge of honor among planters.

But over a decade ago, when I went to work on a tea plantation, all of this knowledge lay in the future. Like my inquisitive friends today, I held romantic notions of white linens and the wholesome, solitary satisfaction that comes with physical labor in lush fields. I’m hardly to blame for my sentimental naivete. I come from a large landed family in northern India, where most men have traditionally gravitated toward professions involving outdoors activity. So when the time came for me to get a job, tea planting seemed like the natural thing to do — and not just metaphorically. Like most northern Indians who choose a life in tea, I wanted to join a plantation in Assam, or nearby Darjeeling, in northeastern India.

More terrestrial affairs dictated otherwise. Since the early 1980s, a violent separatist movement had rocked Assam, rendering the state virtually out of bounds for aspiring planters like me. The only other region in the country with a vibrant tea industry was southern India. We have all experienced moments in life when we’re about to embark on a major journey and are so excited that we completely fail to take note of the omens against us. In my case, the bad omens occurred just as I set out by train from New Delhi to take up my appointment as an assistant manager of a tea plantation in the lush Anamalai Hills of Tamil Nadu. (Thanks to a combination of incessant rains and sunlight, the Anamalais boast the highest yields of tea leaves in the world.) I had barely boarded the train when I realised that my ticket was missing from my wallet. After reporting the loss to the railway police some distance away, I purchased a fresh ticket at a discount. While sprinting back to the train, however, the new ticket somehow slipped out of my pocket. I was forced to buy a third ticket, which, too, was almost parted from me when I accidentally left my wallet in the train’s bathroom.

It was as if some higher force was trying to keep me away from tea plantations. I learned why as soon as I reached my destination. On the same day that I began my journey, the managing director of the plantation had wired my home, asking me not to come ‘‘until further orders.’’ I had, in effect, been fired even before I had begun working. The reason had to do with the director’s extreme annoyance at my reimbursement request for an emergency, one-way airplane journey I had undertaken a fortnight earlier following a five-day stay at the plantation. During this period, I stayed with several managers who were supposed to assess my personality and upbringing. Although I didn’t know it at the time, one of the things the managers watch with keen interest is how much chicken curry an aspiring planter consumes at dinner — eating a lot of chicken is considered a sign of an impoverished, low-class person. To the surprise of my hosts, I scored very high on the chicken test. A vegetarian myself, I didn’t eat any meat at all.

As I was blissfully unaware of the telegram when I arrived, the managing director was perhaps too embarrassed to send me home. But he immediately assigned me to assist one of the toughest managers in the company, whom I will call John. Although a thorough professional, John carried one of the biggest chips on his shoulder I have ever seen — the result, largely, of working under several British planters during his early career. Our relationship got off to a bad start when he found me enjoying a glass of beer at the local Planter’s Club one evening. When he started out planting, John admonished me, no newcomer was allowed to step inside the club for six months. Evidently, by drinking in the first week of my career, I was being too cheeky.

I realised that I had either made a terrible career choice or was simply unlucky in working for a small-minded company that not only begrudged employees air travel during emergencies but also frowned upon something as innocuous as beer-drinking. All this, however, seemed like small stuff compared to what I like to call the company’s dirty little secret of management. The key to running a successful tea estate was not cutting-edge agricultural techniques, but a way of manipulating workers that might have aroused Machiavelli’s envy.

During the old days, managers achieved goals by cracking the whip; in these democratic times, the weapon of choice is money. Withhold enough of it from a labourer by denying him work and he or she will either starve or fall in line. There is a different way of dealing with labourers who prove particularly difficult. Referred to as ‘rascals,’ these are the plantation equivalent of what cops call ‘‘repeat offenders.’’ Managers go to great lengths to probe the most intimate details of the lives of these rogues, especially if they hapen to be involved in extramarital affairs, which are then used for purposes of blackmail. An efficient manager, then, is one who keeps abreast of all the illicit love affairs of his workers, who may number as many as 500 or more.

It was such petty and perverse conduct that soon made me leave tea planting and opt for a career in journalism. Till this day, I have not been able to fathom why all but a handful of planters I came into contact with took an almost sadistic delight in punishing their workers. Perhaps, like managers in most jobs, tea planters enjoy the power they have over subordinates. Perhaps it is the obsession with the bottom line that inspires such behaviour. Either way, it’s worth remembering that ‘‘the cup that cheers,’’ to quote a famous jingle about tea, masks not a little suffering.
(By arrangement with The Wall Street Journal)

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