Item No. 9: Tea, part 2.

Taking the tea for weighing

Tea bushes were grown from seed at first, taken from tall parent plants. Now all the bushes come from cuttings and are grown in winding rows following the contours of the mountains, assuring the standard quality of the leaves. The plants, which would grow to over 30 feet if left alone, are pruned down to about a metre. Tall shade trees punctuate the manicured gardens, where women, with large
bags slung from their foreheads, pick the top two leaves and a bud. Four kilogrammes of leaves are required to make one kilogramme of black tea and an experienced plucker, carefully taking out the two leaves at the tip of the shoot, can pick thirty kilogrammes a day, a heavy load to cart around to the weighing stations. Tea bushes can live for a long time, but here they are renewed in patches across the gardens on a constant schedule. This can be anything from 25 to over 50 years.

Originally it was thought that green tea and black tea, both originating in China, came from two different bushes. After a period of skulduggery, when spies and collectors managed to travel within the closed areas of China, it was realised that tea, like the varieties of pepper, was one plant only.

This picture shows the camelia-family flower, the leaf and fruit on the right, and then the stages in processing. The wet, green leaves are crushed, and then for green tea they are simply dried. Black tea involves a fermentation process during which the unwanted stems are taken away as a sort of fluff, used as fertiliser, and the tea is dried and crushed to the required grade. Fermentation can take as little as 40 minutes and tea delivered to a factory in the afternoon is processed and packed by the following afternoon.

In spite of the fact that nearly all tea made in Kerala is black, and even that is mostly local dust, the Tata tea Museum in Munnar extols the benefits of drinking green tea:

“Enjoy your perfect cup of green tea:
Fill a non-reactive pot or pan with water and heat, when the air bubble come (80 to 85OC)Switch off the power or gas put the green tea 2 to 3 grams for 1.litre close the lid for 3minutes filter it and use 2 to 3 grams for 1.litre for one day is enough to kill the bacteria’s which is generating daily in our body frequently. Use small quantity at a time 2 to 3 ounce because you want to kill that much bacteria’s at a time.”
Tata Tea Museum, Munnar

Item No. 9: Tea, part 1.

Some of the most popular places for tourists, especially as the weather begins to warm, are the hill stations and tea plantations of the Western Ghats. It is easy to see why they are called "tea gardens". The finely sculpted bushes make patterns across the steep slopes of the hills, interspersed with shade trees. The chatter of the women picking the tea carries cheerfully across the valleys, and occasionally you can hear the clack-clack of the scissors which cut the poorer quality teas and drop the leaves into a small bag underneath the blades.
Tea had been introduced to India under the direction of the East India Company in about 1850 to break the stranglehold China had on the valuable commodity, which was gaining in popularity at home. Green and black tea were thought to be different plants, but undercover work by agents of the Company in China established that, although there were varieties of the tea plant, the processing
determined the final product. Successful plantations were established in Assam, and before long, tea was being planted in other suitable locations in India. Many independent estates were converted to tea and still today, as you drive round the mountainsides you come across small, family owned
plantations, many still bearing the names of their original, usually Scottish, owners. The monsoons often caused hardship in the plantations, landslides and flooding wiping out areas of tea wholesale, but on the whole they flourished, nourished by the growing demand for strong, Indian tea in
England.
Every visitor to Munnar must visit the Tata Tea Factory, now a working museum. The tea factory still processes freshly-picked leaves using chunky and old-fashioned looking machines, recently painted a cheerful orange. The leaves are tipped into large hoppers where they are dried and fermented and then graded. The better the quality, the larger the leaf, although most local Indians were adamant that the best tea was to be got from dust and that is what Tata makes now at Munnar. In the tea-tasters’ laboratory the equipment looks archaic, but it was still in use here until the recent hand-over to the new workers' co-operative. In 1964 the Tata group, owners of the Tetley brand, began its takeover of plantations in the area. They entered into an agreement with the large Finlay Company, Tata Tea being formed as a separate entity in 1983. In 2005, faced with a drop in auction prices of over thirty percent, increasing difficulties with labour, and a market concentration on branded products, Tata created the Kenan Devan Hills Produce Company Pvt. A confused and confusing hybrid, the company works as a co-operative. Workers received shares in the company. Since then there have been ups and downs, the plantations having problems recruiting workers. All the pickers are women and most come from Tamil Nadu. Tea picking is skilled and back-breaking work and is mostly done by families who have been here since they were brought in from Tamil Nadu over a hundred years ago. The workers' villages dot the landscape all over this area, their occupants producing tea mostly for the home market.

Picking tea near Munnar