Tea (21 page)

Nineteenth-Century Indian Tea Plantations

During the last half of the nineteenth century, the number of acres planted in tea in India grew astronomically, and with it, the need for labor. The Assam Company had begun to import labor from outside India as early as
1839
, but as more and more land was planted in tea, the search for cheap labor centered on Bengal, where coolies were paid a small amount of money to leave their homes and go to Assam to work on the plantations.

Conditions on the journey from Bengal to Assam were horrible, with heat, mosquitoes, disease, and hunger plaguing the new workers. Labor contractors and agents were paid for each coolie whom they delivered alive to the tea plantations. “Alive” did not equate to “healthy,” and in some years, over half of the coolies died in transit, while countless numbers arrived so weak that they died within the year, mostly from cholera. They were treated as just another part of the financial equation calculated by the Assam Company. If delivered alive, full payment was made. If a coolie died before reaching the plantations, payment was adjusted accordingly. About
30
percent of the recruits were women who brought children with them.

Why did these men and women voluntarily leave their homes, risk a harrowing journey, and work under devastating circumstances for very little money and almost no hope of returning home? They had no choice. Bengal at this point was suffering from a famine that resulted in the deaths, in
1865
–
1866
, of almost
1
.
5
million people. Millions of others remained malnourished. It was a desperate situation from which there seemed to be no escape, except to take a chance on the tea plantations in India.

The British-controlled tea plantations in Assam during the nineteenth century were located far from one another. This geographic isolation allowed the owners to run their plantations as they desired. Like the slaves living on Southern plantations in the antebellum United States, all the tea workers lived on the plantation and were completely dependent on the plantation owners for housing, food, water, and medicine. Although some plantations were better than on others, in general, conditions on the plantations were devastatingly difficult for the workers. Heat and insects were relentless, and there was rarely enough food for the laborers. The water supplies were often polluted, and diseases such as malaria, fevers, diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera were rampant.

It was a situation from which there was no escape for the native worker. There are many records of workers being arrested and beaten severely for trying to leave the plantations. Through intimidation, through debt bondage, and through control of living quarters and food distribution, the British plantation owners held the native workers captive. As a result, the term “coolie,” which originally meant “hired worker,” is now considered offensive.

The situation was exacerbated by the intensity of the work required of the laborers. The planters were trying to accomplish the near impossible—the instant transformation of the Assam jungle into tea plantations. With their limited resources, they could only attempt this by forcing the coolies to perform extremely dangerous tasks, or by literally working them so hard and long that they died of exhaustion.

The Indian government, under the rule of the British, tried to protect the rights of the laborers with laws. Planters, fearful of a loss of profits, formed their own organization, called the Indian Tea Association, and became powerful enough to block any Indian reforms that would alter labor legislation.

By the end of the century, conditions had improved slightly, as the local Indian government within the tea districts gained strength and influence. But the real reason for the improved conditions was that much of the land had already been cleared, and the planters could turn their attentions to working the land already planted. This required labor that was tiring but not nearly as fatally exhausting as clearing land. Even so, conditions on the plantations remained hard. Plantation owners continued to refuse to provide enough food for the basic needs of the workers. Adults worked long hours, but often the only way a family could survive was to have children as young as five or six work alongside their parents.

By this time, half a million acres in India were planted in tea, almost half of which was found in Assam. The toil required to plant, grow, and process the tea caused the deaths of several hundred thousand coolies. But for all this toil and sacrifice, India was able to retain only
15
percent of the profits realized from these plantations—the remainder went to England.

Mechanization and Tea

The British learned much from the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution in their own country, and they applied these lessons to improving production on tea plantations in India. The result was an efficient, mechanized method of farming tea whereby new agricultural methods were employed for the greatest yield possible. The plantations were huge, and the work force was now organized for optimum efficiency of production, with little regard for human need. This was dramatically different from the way the tea gardens and plantations were run in China, where production had really not changed for a thousand years.

The first mechanical hot-air driers were used in India in
1884
. Formerly, the leaves had been allowed to air-dry or were roasted in pans over a fire. Soon, there followed a mechanized roll breaker to roll and twist the leaves, which had previously been done by hand. Finally, machines were invented to sort and pack the tea. The invention of the steam engine also increased profits from tea in India. Steamships carried processed tea down the Brahmaputra River, or steam-powered trains took it out of central Assam to the coast.

The combination of organized labor, steam power, mechanization, and good merchandising techniques helped boost production, increase the market, and lower the price of tea throughout the world. The result was that China simply could no longer compete on the world market, and China's tea trade began to decline after about
1890
. The competition from tea grown in India had an impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of the Chinese. For many centuries, the Chinese living in tea-producing regions had depended on the tea industry for their livelihood. When the Chinese tea market began to decline, many of these people lost their jobs, resulting in poverty and hunger. This situation contributed to the turbulence and instability of China during the latter nineteenth century.

TEA IN CEYLON

At end of the nineteenth century, the greatest competition to Indian tea was not from China but from Ceylon. Renamed Sri Lanka in
1972
, Ceylon is a large tropical island only twenty miles off the southeastern coast of India. It is shaped like a teardrop,
270
miles long from north to south, and
140
miles across at its widest point. Arab and Chinese traders were well acquainted with Ceylon and traded frequently for the spices (especially cinnamon), pearls, and elephants found on the island.

Most of the country is at sea level or slightly above, but mountains in the center of the island rise eight thousand feet high. Although the northern and eastern parts of the country are in the “dry zone” and don't receive enough rainfall to grow crops on a large scale, the rest of the country is called the “wet zone” and receives one hundred inches of rain annually. Some isolated spots may even get up to two hundred inches, comparable to the amount of rain that falls on a rain forest.

The first Europeans to arrive in Ceylon were the Portuguese, who landed in
1505
and set up trading posts along the western coast. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese and then the Dutch fought various tribal rulers of Ceylon, including the king of Kandy, the most powerful tribal ruler in the central part of the
country. They also fought each other until
1656
, when the Dutch defeated the Portuguese and came into sole control of Ceylon, a situation that lasted for the next
140
years.

The British arrived in
1782
and were able to take control of central Ceylon, promising to protect the Sinhalese king who maintained a shaky rule at Kandy. By
1815
, they had abandoned their promises to the Sinhalese king, gained control of the entire country, and declared it a crown colony. The British quickly changed the economy in Ceylon from subsistence farming to a plantation system, and were immediately and impressively successful with planting coffee in the central mountains.

Any land owned by natives of Ceylon and wanted by the British was simply bought up by the crown. By
1835
, four thousand acres had been planted in coffee. By
1845
, the number of acres had increased to thirty-seven thousand. Just when it looked as if growth and profits were secure, the sheen began to come off the leaves—literally. Beginning in
1869
, the leaves of coffee plants in some of the plantations began to show signs of a fungus. Within five years, the fungus had spread throughout the country, affecting every estate in Ceylon. By
1890
, the export of coffee from Ceylon was less than a tenth of what it had been at its zenith, and it was simply not economically feasible to keep up production. Acres and acres of ruined coffee plantations lay fallow and were for sale for very little money.

Fortunately, many farmers had begun planting tea alongside coffee. When coffee could no longer be grown,
many of the estates changed to planting tea. Many of the same problems encountered on Indian tea plantations were also seen in Ceylon, primarily a lack of robust seeds, seedlings, and expertise. In addition to this, there was serious economic hardship among the Sinhalese workers after the collapse of the coffee industry, but by
1900
, three hundred eighty-four thousand acres were planted in tea, and it had become a major export crop for Ceylon. As in India, however, the majority of the plantations were owned by the British.

Many of the workers on Ceylon's tea plantations came from India, particularly after droughts in India caused famine, which happened in
1877
. During this year,
167
,
000
Indian people of Tamil descent went to Ceylon to work. Many later returned to their homeland, but the net gain was tremendous for the plantations in Ceylon. Conditions on the plantations in Ceylon were no better than in India, although the pay was slightly higher. Child labor was still an accepted part of the labor agreement, and children began to work in the fields at the age of five, earning a few cents a day. The large numbers of immigrants of Tamil descent into Ceylon during the nineteenth century were resented by the native Sinhalese, which set the stage for the devastating ethnic conflicts that exist in Sri Lanka today.

The greatest landowner in Ceylon was Sir Thomas Lipton, who first became involved with tea production in Ceylon in
1890
, and who eventually purchased three thousand acres in Ceylon for growing tea (see page
181
).