STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 35 By Bhavi Patel How Tea Became Chai A nyone who has ever traveled by train through India, has heard the 'chaiwala' (tea hawker) shouting "Chai, lelo, chai! Chai, garam chai" (Have some chai, hot chai). According to Statista, India consumed over 1.1 billion kilograms of tea in 2022. How did a nation with no indigenous tea-drinking culture evolve into the world's largest tea consumer? The story of how tea became India's beloved chai is full of spice, intrigue, and ingenuity. Introducing Tea to the Indian Subcontinent Camellia sinensis is believed to have originated in a region that stretches from the south- ern slopes of the Himalayas to the mountains of southern China, northern Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. However, its cultivation and consumption did not de- velop in the Indian subcontinent until the late colonial period, during which time tea was widely grown and consumed in China. The British, who acquired the habit of drinking tea from the Dutch, who in turn got it from the Chinese, would buy tea leaves from China and pay back with opium cultivated in India. The gradual decline in the price of tea led to a huge surge in tea imports. The demand for tea was pushed further by the abundant supply of cheap sugar from slave- worked plantations in the Americas, which the British used to sweeten their tea. Facing the issue of a population increasingly addicted to opium, the Chinese au- thorities seriously objected to the opium-for-tea arrangement. Despite fighting and winning two wars with China to keep the opium and tea flowing, the British realized an alternative source of tea needed to be created. "Tea plants were spirited from China to break the Chinese monopoly," explains Dr. Kurush Dalal, culinary anthropologist, historian, archeologist, and director of the School of Archeology at INSTUCEN. "They were sent to Saharanpur via Kolkata in sealed terrariums. However, the first time this was done, the officer in Kolkata opened the seals to water the plants and as a result, the plants all died in transit. On the second attempt, in 1851, the plants were taken to Darjeeling, where they thrived." Popular around the world, masala chai tea has become a symbol of accessibility and independence to a nation of tea drinkers. Photo courtesy Swastik Arora Tea and Chai: Two Sides of the Same Linguistic Coin? By Bhavi Patel Drinking tea originated in China. However, before the 8th century, there was no dedicat- ed word or character for tea. It was one of the many medicinal herbs and plants, collectively called "tu" 荼 – "bitter plant". In the late 8th century, during the reign of the Tang dynasty, Tao Lu Yu wrote one of the finest works on tea called the "Cha Ch- ing" (The Tea Classic). In this, he gave tea its character—茶 which evolved from the earlier one for tu —荼. They are both similar except that the new character did away with one hori- zontal stroke. As tea drinking increased, the character 茶 became commonly used. But while 茶 was written the same way across the coun- try, it was pronounced differently in different dialects. In the Guangdong province, it was pronounced as cha; in Shantou, it was pro- nounced as te, while in the Fujian province, it was pronounced as ta. In Northern China along the Yangtze River, it was called zhou as well as cha. "Tea derived its name… based on which route it took out of China," said Dalal. "For example, in Russia, India, Japan, and Arab countries, tea traveled by land routes, so derivatives of the Mandarin word ch'a were used, like chai in Hindi, cha in Korean, chá in Portuguese, cha in Japanese, etc." "Tea was sent to Europe via sea routes, mainly through [Xiamen (Amoy)] port, so de- rivatives of the word te were used," he adds. "The Dutch used thee, in English it became tea, in French it is the, in Spanish, Italian, and Hungarian it is te, and so on." Enamel sign with tea-making instructions in Urdu, 1940 from the Urban History Documentation Archive, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

• Cover