by Jeff Koehler
While the Windamere might prepare moister scones and clotted cream that can suspend a spoon upright, the Elgin serves just-fried pakoras (fritters) made of onions, vegetables, or boiled eggs to accompany their selection of sweets and savories, and, along with a long list of fine, single-estate Darjeeling teas—including Margaret’s Hope, Balasun, and Puttabong (Tukvar)—a sublime masala chai that’s aromatic and perfectly spiced.
“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” begins Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady.9 Sitting by the fire in Daisy’s Music Room on a drizzly day, or by the large windows of the front lounge at the Elgin with tea and pakoras when the mists clear for a moment to shed a quick glimpse of the ethereal Kanchenjunga hovering just above Darjeeling, it is hard to disagree.
For British in India, though, liquor, as much as tea, defined the Raj experience, especially in the popular imagination. “Of course drink is what keeps the machine going. We should all go mad and kill one another in a week if it weren’t for that,” proclaimed Flory the timber merchant in Orwell’s Burmese Days. “Booze as the cement of empire.”10 A battery of servants took care of most tasks, and the British often had little to do in the evening but whine about the heat and drink. Measuring out pegs of whisky and generously diluting them down with soda or water became a ritual. So did enjoying a gin cocktail to be served out on the verandah for a sundowner. Or earlier on weekends. “The hour or two before Sunday tiffin [lunch],” wrote Jennifer Brennan in her Anglo-Indian cookbook-cum-memoir, “was the time for several pristine gimlets or pink gins.”11
The gimlet was synonymous with British India. Four parts dry gin to one part Rose’s lime juice shaken with ice and strained into a cocktail glass. Limy sweet and refreshing in the heat, they go down easy. The Windamere still shakes the stiffest in town in a pickling ratio of six to one. At the Elgin, the barman adds a squeeze of fresh lime. Little else has changed.
But tea planters considered pink gin their drink. Just two ingredients that play off one another: gin, preferably Plymouth gin, which is a touch sweet, and Angostura bitters. The latter was developed in 1824 as a medicinal elixir to cure soldiers’ stomach ailments by a German doctor, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, a Prussian army veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who fled to South America, where he was appointed surgeon general of Simón Bolívar’s liberation forces. Originally called Amargo Aromatico (Spanish for “aromatic bitter”), the wily blend of spices, herbs, roots, and berries eventually took the name of the Venezuelan town where Siegert lived. It helped assuage seasickness in sailors and rouse the appetite of those living in unfamiliar, tummy-troubling lands. The gin was meant to disguise the unpalatable, acrid taste of the saucy, brown concoction, but in reality the bitters help cover the searing taste of cheap, local gin.
In 1939, the year the Windamere Hotel opened, the American Charles Henry Baker Jr. offered the perfect recipe for pink gin in his indispensable The Gentleman’s Companion:
Take a thin, stemmed cocktail glass. Shake in 4 or 5 dashes of Angostura, tip the glass like the tower of Pisa and twirl it between thumb and fingers. Whatever Angostura sticks to the glass through capillary attraction is precisely the right amount, although a lot of old India hands whose stomachs are lax find that a lot more Angostura than that is in order to stimulate appetite. Gently pour off the extra bitters that do not cling. Fill glass with gin. That’s all. Superfluous bitters go back in the bottle, on the floor, or out the port hole or window—depending upon who, where and what we are.12
On a cold autumn evening, the quiet, somewhat aloof Lepcha barman at the Windamere prepared it a touch differently. First he chilled the glass by wildly swirling a couple of ice cubes around a wide champagne glass like high-speed roulette balls. After flinging these into the sink, he shook in three or four drops of Angostura, then twirled a new pair of ice cubes around the glass for a few moments before pouring the gin over the top. He set the drink down, silently and without ceremony, on the Chinese-red bar counter.
The color of a pink gin is less Hello Kitty pink than “the orangey-pink of the inside of a conch shell,” as Ian Fleming described it in the final 007 novel.13 From Fleming’s pen—and dangling from Bond’s fingers—the drink exudes sexiness and daring.
Not so from Graham Greene. A number of Greene’s forlorn and doomed characters, stranded in dingy, half-forgotten, and always-neglected British colonial outposts, go “through the doomed motions of mixing another gin and bitters.”14 Scobie, in The Heart of the Matter, “grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the angostura cling along the curve.”15 He and his wife drink them out of boredom and despair: “Life always repeated the same pattern; there was always, sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered, pink gins to be consumed to keep misery away.”16
In British-ruled Malaya the drink was called gin pahit (“bitter gin” in Malay), a favorite tipple in the Far Eastern tales of W. Somerset Maugham, Britain’s other great observer of far-flung colonial fatigue. As the narrator remarks about an Irishman in the story “P. & O.,” “He had lived too long in the East to drink anything else.”17
The same could have been said for many of the men standing at the bar of the Planters’ Club. This is perhaps a more fitting coda for colonial-era tea planters on isolated Darjeeling estates than afternoon teas and warm scones with clotted cream.
CHAPTER 12
Planters and Pluckers
Tea is one of the most labor-intensive of all crops to cultivate, and Darjeeling’s pioneering planters had to settle vast numbers of laborers to work on their isolated estates. They quickly became sprawling, self-contained communities housing thousands of people. They still are. The average garden has just 224 hectares (553 acres) of tea with production of around 100,000 kilograms (220,000 pounds). It is surprising how many people the limited amount of tea must support. Workers number in the hundreds, but many times more live on the estate. Marybong has a dozen small villages scattered across its 395 hectares (976 acres) that are home to about 6,000 people. Just 741 of them work on the estate. About half are schoolkids. Some of the others might work off-garden jobs, from laborers in nearby villages to serving in the mili-tary, but most are supported by the family member who has a position on the garden. Ging has just 692 laborers and 67 staff but supports 7,000 people in two dozen small villages. Ambootia has eleven villages housing 4,500 people. Tukvar supports more than 5,000 people with just 636 of those permanent workers on the estate. Namring is even larger—450 out of its 1,068 total hectares under tea, with 1,398 permanent workers, and yet it’s home to 10,000 people. Considering its fame, Makaibari, covering 573 hectares (1,415 acres) with 250 hectares (617 acres) of tea and about 1,500 people living on the estate and some 650 employees, is relatively modest.
Tea garden land is not owned by the estates but rented on a freehold lease from the government of West Bengal for renewable thirty- to ninety-nine-year periods. A lease can be transferred or sold, but a new owner inherits the workers living on the garden and must employ them. The clear and rigid hierarchy has the planter at the top. “It was a system created by Britishers,” Dhancholia said. Medieval and serflike, it remains firmly in place.
Darjeeling’s early tea planters, wrote E. C. Dozey in A Concise History of the Darjeeling District Since 1835, “will be remembered among those who led the forlorn hope, who planted the banners of civilisation and industry on these mountains; and in sowing the seeds of the tea plant have laid the foundations of India’s increased prosperity.”1
Published in 1922, that is perhaps rather generous in spirit. A lively and opinionated contemporary Darjeeling historian offers a different appraisal of the same men:
In the early days, only those Englishmen who failed to make it as soldiers, sailors, clerks, and by default, with nothing else to lose and nowhere else to go, took up life as a “tea planter.” They knew nothing whatsoeve
r about tea and it is doubtful if they had even set eyes on a tea bush. Scoundrels, rascals, and scallywags enlisted to become lord and master of a little fiefdom called a tea garden in the exotic misty hills of Darjeeling.2
Such a scathing assessment was echoed by Major (retired) Sandeep Mukherjee, the secretary and principal adviser for the Darjeeling Tea Association. “They were the riffraff, the criminals; the persons [the British] thought would pollute the society were sent here,” he said on a cool spring morning at the association’s office beside the Planters’ Club. Tall and upright, with a strong jaw and neatly parted hair, he still holds the military bearing of his days as an aide-de-camp to the Chief of Army Staff in Kashmir. “Nobody at home, they became somebody here,” he said at his large desk, turning over a cigarette packet. He wore three rings on his right hand, including, on his pinkie, a luminous pearl from South India as big as a marble. “Nobodies who had nothing to lose.” Driven, at times brutal, and continually busy, they began from scratch, planting the steep, heavily forested hillsides cut by ravines. But, he acknowledged, “It would have been impossible to create this industry without such personalities, and that idea of superiority.”
Undeniably the planters were a mixed bunch. Many came from the working or middle classes—shopkeepers, chemists, retired army officers, sailors. A handful of minor gentry also headed to India’s tea gardens from Britain to make something of themselves. Or, at least not disgrace the family back home. The protagonist in Rudyard Kipling’s story “Yoked with an Unbeliever” who is “sent out to ‘tea’” is typical of this kind:
What “tea” meant he had not the vaguest idea, but fancied that he would have to ride on a prancing horse over hills covered with tea-vines, and draw a sumptuous salary for doing so; and he was very grateful to his uncle for getting him the berth. He was really going to reform all his slack, shiftless ways, save a large proportion of his magnificent salary yearly, and, in a very short time, return to marry Agnes Laiter. Phil Garron had been lying loose on his friends’ hands for three years, and, as he had nothing to do, he naturally fell in love. He was very nice; but he was not strong in his views and opinions and principles, and though he never came to actual grief, his friends were thankful when he said good-bye, and went out to this mysterious “tea” business near Darjiling. They said, “God bless you, dear boy! Let us never see your face again,”—or at least that was what Phil was given to understand.3
Like Phil, planters rarely lacked faith in being able to do the job—then or in the years that followed. “I had been brought up in an era of empire, and inculcated with the idea that for the British to go out and run colonies and tropical enterprises was perfectly normal,” wrote tea-planter-turned-author Roy Moxham about going out to Malawi in 1961 as an eighteen-year-old. “I had read the short stories of Somerset Maugham, and from his acute observations had a surprisingly good idea of how planters behaved. I had read a good deal about young men who worked in the tropics. The job was challenging but not daunting. I knew nothing about tea, but I could learn.”4 Moxham couldn’t even drive—in his telling, seemingly the only real requirement for the position. But he winged that, too, and taught himself on the rain-slicked dirt roads of the estate before anyone could find out otherwise.5
Determined and confident (more than heroes or scallywags) are perhaps more accurate generalizations of Darjeeling’s pioneers. But also inexperience, even ignorance. Their most common trait was having no idea how or where to plant tea bushes, nor process the leaves. “With no previous experience,” Lama wrote, “they had to rely on information obtained hearsay and it was a pure learn-as-you-earn industry or go-broke-as-you-work business.”6 The workers in the factories and fields also had to learn to prune, pluck, and process tea as they went along.
The planter’s duties were “multifarious,” as the 1907 edition of the Bengal District Gazetteer for Darjeeling noted, and included
the supervision of the cultivation, the control of the manufacture, the management of the large labour force employed, the construction of roads in the estate, and often the erection of the buildings. He must therefore combine, as far as possible, the knowledge and skill of an agriculturist, engineer and architect, and even, to some extent, of a doctor; and above all, he must have firm control over his labourers, the art of management, and generally the power of conduct.7
While few planters act as doctors or road surveyors today, many of the other tasks still exist in the job description, plus a few more. “Police and judge,” said one. “Banker and counselor.”
Not all the planters during the British era in Darjeeling were English or Scottish, and some of the eclectic array of foreigners came to the hills for reasons other than tea. The Reverend William Start, an Anglican-clergyman-turned-Baptist-evangelist, brought a band of Protestant missionaries from the Moravian Church in Germany to India in the late 1830s.8 The small group of young men and women from outside Berlin traveled to Liverpool and then on to India, an arduous journey that took five months around the Horn by ship to Calcutta. From there, they had a further month’s journey to reach Start’s mission on the plains. The reverend believed in communal work, and the Germans had little time to spread the gospel in their day-to-day efforts simply to survive. After two years, Start ordered them to his Tukvar Mission just north of Darjeeling. They started over and struggled even harder in the mountains. Within a few years, the venture failed, and Start—angry, no doubt, that there had not been a single conversion—withdrew his financial backing. The Germans had to abandon Tukvar, the homes they had built, and the fields they had planted that were, finally, beginning a return on their considerable efforts.
Without means to return to Europe, they settled in the newly established town of Darjeeling and tried to support themselves by selling produce, doing carpentry, or whatever they could. Darjeeling’s nascent tea industry soon offered opportunities, and their names are strewn throughout its pioneering decades (and found on gravestones in Darjeeling’s rather unkempt Old Cemetery). The most frequent that crop up are from the Wernicke-Stölke dynasty, with various marriages between them and involvement on numerous estates.
The most successful was the second-generation Andrew Wernicke. Just a handful of months old when his family arrived at the Tukvar Mission, he grew up in the hills. Yet by the time he was coming of age, Wernicke had no plans to work in tea. He was a scholar of Greek and Latin with intentions of entering the church. At the end of 1863, while he was working on a B.A. at Bishop’s College in Calcutta, his father died suddenly, and Andrew was compelled to break off studies and return to Darjeeling to support his widowed mother (a Stölke). His younger brother, Fred, was an assistant on the Soom Tea Estate, and Andrew reluctantly followed, gaining an assistant’s position on Captain Masson’s Tukvar Tea Estate.
Almost immediately, he nearly truncated his new career with a gun accident. “Using an old-fashioned muzzle-loader gun, he returned to his bungalow from green-pigeon shooting. The gun had been wetted by rain. Resting the gun on the edge of the bed, he was wiping it down when it slipped to the floor, exploding with the concussion, and discharged the shot, which shattered the left hand and wrist.”9 His arm had to be amputated below the elbow. Wernicke wore a knitted sock over the stump and carried on. While needing help to get dressed and cut his meat at the table, he rode ponies, played billiards, and even shot birds on occasion. Within a few years, he left Tukvar to manage Makaibari, where he soon married a girl a decade his junior, the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Niebal.
In the 1870s land was becoming available for planting. With his brother, Andrew opened out Lingia and then Tumsong estates, “a bold and arduous venture for father and Fred,” Andrew’s son Frank said years later, “and it was only by exercising the most rigid economy and sacrificing even the simplest of luxuries that they were able to achieve their objective.” A new tea garden doesn’t immediately start repaying its investment. “It takes 5 or 6 years before the tea bush comes into bearing and manufacture can begin. These must have be
en lean years indeed, waiting for the first returns from the sale of their tea.”10
Andrew Wernicke was over six feet tall, lanky, and heavily bearded. “He walked with a slight stoop and one shoulder slightly depressed, owing to the loss of his left arm,” his son recalled late in his own life. “In expression his face was rather pale, somewhat care-worn and meditative. He seldom smiled and I don’t think I ever heard him laugh. His dress was always simple, and to my childish critical eyes, shabby.”11 Decades of living an arduous, austere life damaged his health. By 1883, Wernicke, severely suffering from rheumatism, was forced to retire. But he wasn’t done with tea, acquiring Glenburn Tea Estate in 1895 and then Bannockburn across the Rangili Valley from it.
Wernicke died in 1904. By then, the Wernickes and Stölkes had owned or managed more than a dozen gardens: Lingia, Marybong, Tumsong, Steinthal, Soom, Glenburn, Bannockburn, Makaibari, Risheehot, Pandam, Aloobari, Goomba, and Tukvar. This impressive list includes some of the most illustrious gardens in Darjeeling.
Among the colorful foreign figures in the nineteenth-century annals of Darjeeling tea is Louis Mandelli. His father, Jerome, from an aristocratic Maltese family, was raised in Milan and fled as a young man to South America to join freedom fighter and Italian patriot Guiseppe Garibaldi, who led the Italian Legion in Uruguay’s Civil War (1838–51). He returned with Garibaldi to capture Sicily and southern Italy from the Bourbons, events that led to the unification of the country. Falling out with his family, Jerome changed his surname from that of his father (Count Castel Nuovo) to that of his mother (Mandelli), which he passed down to his son, Louis.12