There is barely a person in India who is not fond of chai that is tea. But do you know where did it come from? So let’s talk about the 170 years of Chai in India. The craze of Chai started when a Scottish mandarin smuggled a tea plant from China in 1848, where the Chinese people have been drinking it for around 2,000 years.
Long ago, the value of tea was very high. In 1635, the prices of tea in England were as high as £6 to £10 per pound of the herb (£600 to £1,000, today). Later in 1662, in the wedding of King Charles and Catherine of Braganza, her dowry comprised of a chest of tea, and the island of Bombay for an annual lease of £10, which was then equal to the cost of a pound of tea in England.
However, later by the 18th century, due to certain reasons, the English were not able to afford the silver that China demanded continuing trade with Britain. With this, to eliminate this problem, the British started growing opium in India extensively in Bengal, Patna, Benares and the Malwa plateau. With this, they started smuggling it into China, in exchange for their favorite beverage, tea.
Further in 1788, the idea of transplanting saplings from China started to arise in The Royal Society of Arts and soon after that tea saplings were discovered in India in the state of Assam by Robert Bruce and Maniram Dewan in1824. With this discovery, the tea plantation further expanded to Assam and Darjeeling.
In 1853, Fraser’s Magazine suggested that India and not China was the “natural home of the tea plant”. Gradually by 1888, Indian tea exports into Britain were over 86 million pounds which exceeded even China’s 80 million pounds. Indian pedigrees of the beverage colonized London as well as Ireland, Scotland, many other parts of Europe and the United States in the 1880s. Tea grown in India was marketed in showy boxes, made of wood taken out of timber forests in Dehradun, Simla or Rangoon. In India, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was opened in 1878 which was symbiotically rooted to the growth of Indian tea.
The first big experiment of the Indian Tea Association which was founded in 1881 for globalizing Indian tea began on the Indian Railways. India had grown into a huge market for tea by 1901, and in 1903, the Tea Cess Bill was passed. This regulated cess on tea exports, which was then used for tea promotion in India as well as internationally. Soon after that, tea became a vital part of the Indian economy, where the Tea Association prided itself by stating that “a better cup of tea could, in general, be had at the platform tea stalls than in the first-class restaurant cars on the trains.”
Huge posters and hoardings were put up that showed tea recipes in Indian languages, on various railway platforms, a few of which still can be seen in the domestic and sub-urban railway areas of Bengal, at stations like Ballygunge, Dum Dum, Naihati, Bangaon, Shantipur, and Ranaghat. It can be said that a destiny’s stolen gift to the British empire turned into a highly loved beverage in India. By the 1930s, India became the factory and also the market for British-packaged tea.
With this growth, India showed a consumption of over 70% of its crop by the 21st century. Tea was sold in each and every place, be it a big restaurant or a small tea stall at the railway station.
A historian Lizzie Collingham wrote, “The chai-wallah is still the first thing a passenger hears on waking up in a train in northern India as he marches through the carriages, a metal kettle swinging in one hand and glasses in the other, calling out ‘chai-chai-chai’.”
So this was the 170 years old journey of chai that is tea in India. And with this, our country became the second largest producer of tea in the world after China. Today, chai is loved by all the citizens and is consumed all over the country in all parts of the day.