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