India can secure the future of its faltering tea industry only by learning from the past

Ask someone which country has the highest per capita tea consumption and their answer most likely will be China. It is the world’s largest producer by far, with 3.18 million tonnes made last year, and is seen as the place from where tea consumption spread across the world. On September 25, 1660, the British diarist Samuel Pepys wrote, “I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drunk before...”

After China, number two would seem to be India, the world’s second largest producer, with 1.36 million tonnes. This is the home of chai, tea brewed with milk and sugar, a drink rapidly spreading in popularity across the world, much to the bemusement of Indians who encounter it as Chai Tea Lattes. We have a prime minister who famously claims to have sold chai as a child and who liked to have cosy televised chats called Chai Pe Charcha with the nation.

In reality, in terms of per capita tea consumption, China and India rank quite low. The German data company Statista in 2016 put China at 21st position with 0.57 kg tea consumed per person and India at 29th with 0.33 kg per person. The world leader is Turkey where average tea consumption is a startling 3.16 kg, followed by Ireland, where it is 2.19 kg. Even allowing for some changes in rankings – Ukraine’s number 20 position might have fallen – we just do not drink that much tea individually.

It is not uncommon to find products where low per capita consumption in India adds up to world-beating volumes. This is the reason why many consumer goods companies stick with all the challenges of the Indian market. But the per capita tea ranking is still surprising when one considers that at number four, after the United Kingdom (no surprise there), is Pakistan, with a massive per capita consumption of 1.5 kg each year.

Pakistan is the world’s largest tea importer, sourcing from Kenya, Vietnam, Rwanda, Uganda and China. (One can only imagine the regret at India’s Tea Board that such a large and close market is cut off by politics). This import cost is a real burden. “I appeal to the nation to cut down the consumption of tea by one or two cups because we import tea on loan,” said Ahsan Iqbal, minister for planning and development, in 2022. The Global Tea Report shows that Pakistan’s import in 2023 was unchanged at 236,000 tonnes.

Other surprises in the per capita tea ranking are Chile at number nine, with 1.19 kg, the only Latin American nation with a major tea habit. Germany has long been known as a buyer of some of the most premium Darjeeling teas, but its number 18 position (0.69 kg) is probably skewed by the region of East Frisia, where tea consumption per capita is as high as Turkey’s. East Frisians like to drink their tea with cream and rock sugar, deliberately left unmixed, so one gets different taste and texture sensations in one cup – bitter, creamy, then sweet. Germany has listed “East Frisian Tea Culture” as part of its UNESCO Nationwide Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

These consumption figures are more than curiosities. They reflect the complicated histories of tea, and bode its possible future. In particular, they expose the problem with many histories of tea that, written by English-speaking historians, mostly reflect British or Anglosphere perspectives. In this narrative, tea is a Chinese product encountered by Portuguese and Dutch traders in East Asia. The elites in these countries developed a taste for it, and the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza brought it (along with the seven islands of Bombay) to the UK when she married King Charles II in 1662.

Pepys’s tasting predates this by two years, hinting at greater complexity. East Frisia borders the Netherlands (number 15 on the per capita ranking), whose sailors served on Dutch East India Company ships, which is where they might have got their taste for tea. Tea had already spread from China to Japan and Korea on one side, and to Tibet and Central Asia on the other. A key element in the latter trade was the Chinese need for horses to counter Mongol raiders. In Victor H Mair and Erling Hoh’s The True History of Tea, one of the few books to take a more global perspective, the writers note how “in 1074, the Song government established the Tea and Horse Agency with the specific aim of using Sichuan tea to purchase Tibetan war horses”.

The standard British history of tea disregards all this, moving straight into its growing popularity in the 18th century, not least because it was seen as an acceptable beverage for women, unlike coffee, which was consumed in the coffee houses that only men frequented. The British traded opium sourced from India for tea, and the resistance to this from the Chinese court led to the Opium Wars of 1842 and 1860 that cracked open China for British trade (and transferred control of Hong Kong). The British also discovered tea growing in India’s North East, which led them to plant Chinese tea varieties in huge plantations developed for the Western market. These plantations helped standardise tea for mass markets, which did not prize the variations of small farmers like the Chinese.

An unexpected sidelight was the discovery that Darjeeling produced exceptionally fine tea with a complex taste. Other areas, such as Assam, the Nilgiris and Ceylon, were developed for more basic, strong teas. Eventually, the tea industry turned to developing the domestic Indian market. A tea marketing committee was set up, which became today’s Tea Board, and after initial failures, it was found that brewing tea with milk and spices was the formula for hooking India onto tea, or chai.

Premium Darjeeling and mass market Assam and Nilgiri teas became one of India’s top exports. Russia, which developed a tea habit in the 18th century from Central Asia, became a major buyer thanks to Indo-Soviet ties – until the collapse of the Soviet Union left Indian plantations with legacy plantings of the strong black tea favoured by Russia, rather than more premium varieties. Meanwhile, plantations in Sri Lanka and East Africa started competing with Indian mass market tea, while Darjeeling’s premium tea was hit by labour problems, climate change and competition from across the border in Nepal. Today India’s tea narrative seems to be one of perpetual disaster, with plantations closing down and producers left with unsellable tea.

Familial drink

But looking at the history of the other markets could have provided pointers to the future. Turkey is particularly interesting because its tea history is relatively recent: from almost no consumption, it reached top consumer per capita status in just 100 years. During Ottoman rule, there was some knowledge of tea in the imperial court, but coffee was the main beverage. Still, coffee was viewed with suspicion by Muslim clerics, for its excessively stimulating powers, and by rulers, for fears of conspiracies being hatched in coffee shops. This laid the ground for the rise of tea, which was seen as a milder, more familial drink.

Mair and Hoh write that Turkey’s tea market started to develop after the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869 brought tea for the Russian market directly through the Bosphorus to Black Sea ports like Odessa. Some of the cargo was offloaded in Istanbul en route and “in 1881, Barbier de Maynard listed green tea, powdered tea and export tea in his Turkish-French dictionary”. The collapse of the Ottomans in 1923 affected the coffee trade through the Yemeni port of Mocha, while bringing to power Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose reformist zeal extended to beverages. Along with Western clothing and the Roman alphabet, Ataturk wanted Turks to embrace tea. Crucially, he decreed that Turkey had to produce its own tea. Seedlings were planted along the Black Sea coast and tea consumption grew alongside production.

Turkey’s huge tea market tends to go unnoticed because it is entirely internal. This is possible because tea is relatively easy to grow. Coffee and cacao grow in a narrow tropical band, and come from trees that take time and are difficult to grow. Tea, on the other hand, comes from a shrub with a wider range. It needs plenty of rain and a cool climate, but can survive, even benefit, from some frost. Pakistan’s real tea tragedy is that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who admired Ataturk, never got to follow his lead in growing its own tea.

Apart from tea, Ataturk encouraged another crop that indirectly affected it. The Ottomans used to source sugar from sugarcane in their colonies in Egypt, Palestine and Cyprus. Now cut off from that source, the new Turkish government promoted sugar beet, which grew in the country’s temperate climate. As a result of that decision, Turkey is now one of the biggest producers of sugar from sugar beet, which matters for tea since most of theirs is consumed very sweet.

The link between sugar and tea explains the high consumption in the United Kingdom and Ireland as well. During the Industrial Revolution, factory owners saw sugar, sourced from Britain’s Caribbean colonies, as an easy source of energy for their workers. Tea, sourced from India, was the delivery mechanism. Sweet tea and bread became a filling, if not nutritious, basis for workers’ diets. Strong sweet tea would make fortunes for British companies like Tate & Lyle (sugar) and Lipton’s (tea), whose owners made sure to maintain markets through advertising and exercising political power.

This power was exercised at the production end as well. Tea and sugar had to be cheap, which meant that plantation workers had to be paid as little as possible. The British ensured this by labour transfers. Indentured workers from India were sent to Caribbean sugar plantations and the so-called tea tribes – such as the Mundals, Gonds and Santhals from Eastern India – were packed off to the tea plantations of the North East. As essentially captive labour without local roots, it was hard for these groups to agitate for better treatment.

Quantity over quality

One factor in the history and trade of tea that is both obvious and yet often overlooked is that tea is a leaf. This makes it fundamentally different from fruits like coffee and cacao. Fruits produce less and the need for labour arises at the time of harvest. Tea leaves, on the other hand, grow continuously and therefore the need for labour is continuous though broadly organised in flushes, or growing seasons. Darjeeling has a spring or first flush, followed by a summer or second flush. After this comes a growth spurt in the monsoon, called monsoon flush, which was often disregarded in the past because the fast growth made for coarse tea, but is used now to make green tea. Finally comes the autumn flush, which can be wonderfully mellow. It is Darjeeling’s hidden secret.

This continual production means that tea plants produce high quantities, which is good for consumers since it keeps prices down. For producers, though, it is less of a benefit, unless they can negotiate lucrative bulk deals or do greater value addition at the production point through techniques like smoking, roasting, flavouring or varying fermentation rates. The Indian tea industry tended to avoid such value addition since it meant greater labour cost. Bulk deals through the Russian market or large British buyers were much more appealing.

This also explains why the Indian industry embraced mechanisation through the CTC, or Cut Tear Curl, process pioneered in Assam. Instead of the full leaves of Orthodox tea, whose production requires more work but creates a more complex brew, CTC efficiently produces small pellets that brew quick and strong. CTC comes with a hidden problem, however. Creating such cheap, easy to produce teas means it is easy to replicate Indian tea production elsewhere – which is what happened at plantations in East Africa.

Viewed from this perspective, the problems of India’s tea industry are both self-inflicted and inevitable. It was always going to be impossible to keep mass producing tea without encouraging tea industries in other locations, especially since, as Turkey shows, tea is relatively easy to grow. Global warming is increasing the geography for tea. For a while now, the United Kingdom has had a tea garden in Tregothnan, in the southern county of Cornwall, but tea is now being planted as far north as Scotland. In the United States, tea has been planted in South Carolina, while Canada now grows tea in rainy British Columbia.

There are two possible ways for Indian tea to go from here. One, looking at the considerably higher per capita consumption in Pakistan, it could focus on the domestic market, especially lower down the value chain. It has long been known that many potential consumers are not able or willing to pay for tea. Many years back, Hindustan Lever developed an ultra-cheap drink called Brooke Bond Tiger made from tapioca starch (for body) with tea flavouring. The tea industry was appalled and campaigned vigorously against the product, which was finally halted. But even if the product was not ideal, the need was correctly identified. There is a super cheap market for tea in India that can be grown significantly over time.

The other direction is going up the value chain. It could, in a throwback to the Chinese origins of tea, produce smaller batches with greater care and variation in processing. This means varying fermentation rates to create more oolong or semi-fermented teas, smoking to create teas like Lapsang Souching, roasting to make teas like Japanese houjicha, or flavouring with different ingredients. It will also have to mean educating consumers about these teas and why it is worth paying more for the greater labour involved in making them.

This is the antithesis of the mass production model that the Tea Board has always championed in India. A few far-thinking gardens in Darjeeling and Assam make teas this way and market them directly to customers online. This is also ideally suited to smaller producers in states like Manipur and Nagaland, including those working with the tea varieties native to their region, rather than the ones imported from China. There is even a local smoked variety known as Phalap traditionally made by communities like the Singho tribe, which could be developed as a cult tea favourite. There are many ways to increase Indian tea production and consumption, but it might need to start by looking at the wider global history of tea.

Vikram Doctor is a writer based in Goa. His email address is vikdocatwork@gmail.com.