by Jeff Koehler
Or maybe it was the son himself who fought for Garibaldi in the late 1840s as a very young man. Accounts of Louis Mandelli’s early life are riddled with gaps, and the sketchy dates that are known do fit and can apply to him rather than his father.
But in 1864 Louis Mandelli did somehow finagle a position managing the Lebong & Minchu Tea Estate. He appears abruptly on Darjeeling municipal records, and on those of the Catholic Church, as he married in January 1865, not long after arriving. That he had no experience with tea seemed to matter little. Soon under his command were two more estates, Mineral Springs and Chongtong. He now controlled 550 hectares (1,350 acres), a not insignificant amount considering the effort involved in moving between properties. “Being so busy looking after the three gardens under my charge,” Mandelli wrote in a letter, “and each of them is at a great distance from one to another, so I have to remain at each for days & days.”13
Before long, Mandelli became a partner in two other gardens. One was the picturesque Kyel Tea Estate. When a division of Lingia next door was given to Mary, the daughter of Lingia’s owner, as a wedding present in the 1870s and added to Kyel, the new estate was rechristened Marybong (“Mary’s place” in Lepcha). Even today, the winding fourteen-mile journey from Darjeeling to Marybong takes about ninety minutes by jeep in the dry season. Mandelli did it on horseback.
“I can assure you, the life of a Tea Planter is far from being a pleasant one, especially this year,” Louis Mandelli wrote to a friend down on the plains in 1876, “drought at first, incessant rain afterwards, & to crown all, cholera among the coolies, beside the commission from home to inspect the gardens, all these combined are enough to drive any one mad.”14
The rugged, feral life on an isolated garden, the hundreds of laborers under a planter’s responsibility, and the fickleness—and all too frequent cruelty—of nature when farming tea in the hills took their toll. So did the unhealthy climate and tropical diseases. “Quinine every morning, castor oil twice a week, and calomel”—also known as mercurous chloride, a poisonous white power used as a purgative, antiseptic, and fungicide—“at the change of the moon,”15 went the planters’ preventive, self-medicating prescription.
Mandelli found solace in ornithology, shooting and skinning some specimens, but mostly preserving ones that local collectors had shot or trapped for him on lengthy trips to Sikkim, Tibet, and Bhutan.
But deep losses on the estates and mounting debts to the bank began to wear him down, and he even found his beloved hobby exhausting. “The rains are frightful, the dampness horrible & the fog so dense that you cannot see few yards before you,” he wrote of collecting around Darjeeling, adding that any excursion into neighboring Sikkim is “simply madness, as the leeches will eat you alive.”16
But surely the biggest blow came from an English rival, Allan Octavian (A. O.) Hume. “Yes, Hume is a brute, in fact, I call him a swindler, as far as birds are concerned,” Mandelli wrote to a friend in January 1876:
What else would be thought of a man who promised to help me / and very grand and magnificent promises they were / to make my collection of Indian birds as perfect as he possibly could, in order only to get out the best & the rarest things to be found up here, & then leaving me on the lurch now, as he has found out that I am no more his slave subservient to his sneaking and bland manner & hypocritical ways?
Such robust underlining is not typical in Mandelli’s letters, except when writing of Hume. “I should say that swindler is too mild a term for such a man after having got out from me about 5000 birds & given only in return about 800, the commonest birds in India, 400 of which went down the khud [ravine or precipice], as they were not worth the carriage.”17
But how to complain about Hume, except in private letters like this? (“The only consolation I have in this matter is that I am not the only one who has been victimized!!!”)18 Hume had become director-general of agriculture in India in 1870 and was the country’s preeminent and most powerful ornithologist. Although considered the father of Indian ornithology, Hume is far better known as the founder of the Indian National Congress Party—the party of the Gandhi and Nehru clans, and still a dominant political force in the country. Hume made an open call to students in 1883, and during the party’s historical first meeting in 1885, the Brit was nominated to be the party’s general secretary, a position he held for nearly a quarter century.
Reading Mandelli’s letters it is impossible to picture him dancing in black tie at the Planters’ Club or playing a game of cards after a couple of rounds of pink gins. His bank, creditors, and poor health are frequently mentioned. “For the last two or three months I have been unwell & troubled with slow fever, cough, deafness etc. etc.,” Mandelli wrote in March 1877. “In fact I think old age is creeping fast on me.”19 He was just forty-four years old.
By the end of 1879 Mandelli was no longer in charge of any of the four gardens that he had recently been running or owning, an incredible turn of events. His problems—debts? poor harvests? depression?—must have severely worsened. In February the following year he committed suicide.
Mandelli left behind a wife and five children in Darjeeling. Municipal records show them steadily liquidating his property for cash over the next two years. They sold what remained of Mandelli’s prized bird collection to none other than A. O. Hume.20
The cause of Mandelli’s death was listed as “unknown” in the Bishop’s Death Register, but this was perhaps done by a sympathetic official knowing that burial in the church cemetery would be impossible if the truth was recorded. Before long, though, news of his suicide was considered common enough knowledge that when the British Museum, with thirteen of his birds in their collection, published an appreciation of Mandelli in 1906, the text clearly stated that Mandelli had taken his own life, though how remains a mystery. Mandelli used arsenic in preparing bird skins, and perhaps some grains helped him to end his life and hide the way he did it.21 This could be another reason his death was “unknown”: arsenic poisoning has many of the same symptoms as other ailments and, until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was difficult to detect, especially in a station as distant as Darjeeling.
Mandelli’s grave is impossible to locate today. The tomb is not in the main Old Cemetery, but the Catholic-dominated Singtom Cemetery, at North Point below St. Joseph’s School. Built in 1858, it is known as the New Cemetery. In both graveyards, the tombstones of settlers, soldiers, wives, and children are tipped over, cracked, broken, and obscured by moss, vines, and weeds. The inscriptions on the older ones have been worn away over the years, and vandals plucked out the brass letters on other ones during the violent, agitation-filled mid–1980s, rendering names and dates into a series of faint dots like a marquee with broken lightbulbs.
Mandelli’s legacy lives on not in tea but the animal kingdom. At least a half dozen birds carry his name, including Mandelli’s bush- warbler, Mandelli’s willow-warbler, Mandelli’s snow-finch, and Mandelli’s tit-babbler. The rare red-breasted (or Bhutan) hill partridge (Arboricola mandellii) is another. A dozen samples of these had been gathered by “Mr Mandelli’s hunters” but “nothing absolutely is known of its habits, food or note,” informed the three-volume The Game Birds of India, Burmah, and Ceylon,22 coauthored by Hume, generous, at least, in his attribution. Details of Mandelli’s spotted babbler (Pellorneum ruficeps mandellii), a rufous-colored bird with a puffy, pale breast streaked with browns and an upright tail, are more forthcoming. “They are very restless, energetic birds, constantly on the move and keeping up a never-ending chatter amongst themselves,” reads the 1922 edition of another guide to British India’s fauna. They are easy to watch if “perfectly still, but a movement of hand or foot sends them scuttling off into denser cover,” the volume warn. “They have many sweet notes as well as harsh ones, but their prevailing note is that of the genus, a constantly repeated ‘pretty-dear, pretty-dear.’”23
During Darjeeling’s early decades, “all the managers and assistants on the estates [were] Eur
opeans,” the Darjeeling Gazetteer noted in 1907.
It is a remarkable fact that, though educated natives are much cheaper than Europeans, it has not been found economical to employ them generally, although here and there a few natives have done remarkably well, and have proved themselves worthy of full trust in positions of responsibility. The result is that although the industry in the hills is now fifty years old, it is still almost entirely in the hands of Europeans.24
The exception was Makaibari. By the time this edition of the Gazetteer was published, the estate was already in its second generation of Indian ownership.
The man, though, who originally began planting out the garden in the mid-nineteenth century was a British officer, Captain Samler. After five years in the East India Company army, he had deserted along with ten Gorkha sepoys. They raided an armory at the base and headed 150 miles north to the heavily wooded slopes below Kurseong. It was the start of the monsoon, and the men planted maize—which would later lend the land they settled its name, Makaibari, “cornfield.” By time the ears were tall and ripening, the military police had located the rene- gades. The men were prepared, though, and repelled a series of raids. Eventually the authorities left the fugitives alone. From the tea nursery that Dr. Campbell had started in Kurseong—the town hovered on the ridgeline above them—Samler swiped saplings and planted them on Makaibari.25
Meanwhile, down on the plains, a precocious fourteen-year-old boy named Girish Chandra (G. C.) Banerjee, from a rich land-owning Bengali family, ran away from home on his horse. With perfect English and impeccable handwriting, he found work on a British base.26 He was clever, says Rajah Banerjee, his great-grandson, and by sixteen G. C. had cornered the pony express service between Kurseong and Darjeeling and then began buying prime land. At twenty he was already the wealthiest man in region. He had also become a close friend of Samler’s.27
The British Crown granted Samler amnesty for his help during the 1857 rebellion, which some infer to mean that he helped track down and kill anyone suspected of taking part in the uprising.28 (Rajah denies this.) The government recognized his estate. In 1859, he was appointed agent for the Darjeeling Tea Company and made legal owner of Makaibari. Samler died the same year, but a month before passing away, he sold the estate to his friend G. C. Banerjee, the first of four generations of Banerjees to control it.
While planters and their assistants on Darjeeling’s estates were largely European, the laborers were all Nepalese. Cultivating tea in the hills requires a vast labor force, and manpower shortages have been a problem from the beginning. Even during Darjeeling’s pioneering decades, growth outpaced the available labor supply.
When the British began establishing gardens in the mid-nineteenth century, the population of the Darjeeling region was scant. Unable to get enough local Lepchas, they brought in Gorkhas from Nepal. Outside the region Gorkhas are best known for their legendary military prowess and ubiquitous large, curved kukri swords. The British fought them in the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814–16) and then incorporated them into their army.*
Save for one caveat, the 1907 Darjeeling Gazetteer carried the typical enthusiastic attitude of early commentators on their work ethic: “The Nepalis, who form the great majority, although extremely improvident, are a cheerful, hardworking, and enterprising race, courageous to a degree, and pleasant to work with, so long as they are treated with fairness and consideration.”29 But the gardens required not just labor but inexpensive labor, which was, as the Gazetteer noted in that global and timeless dictum of economically profitable agriculture, “a matter of vital importance to the [tea] industry, as cheap labour is essential to its prosperity.”30
Ultimately the gardens set up a system that would entice the workers to come and, importantly, remain. Along with daily wages, they were offered housing and basic necessities. Because the gardens were so isolated, they also received food rations. Workers and their families settled on the estates in small villages based largely on caste or clan. Spread over a garden’s hillsides and surrounded by fields of tea, these consist of tight clusters of small, wood-framed homes with two or three rooms and a covered but usually open-air kitchen. Flowering plants, herbs, and the occasional ripening chili pod grow in chipped clay pots, chickens poke around, and pale pye-dogs lounge in the morning sun. Garden villages contain schools, temples, a day care, and a medical clinic, plus small shops selling staples from potatoes and batteries to soda and umbrellas.
Pay amounts are fixed across all of Darjeeling’s estates in an agreement negotiated every three years between the Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA) and the Darjeeling Indian Tea Association (DITA), representing the gardens,* various unions representing the workers, and the West Bengal government. For April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2014, the daily pay rate was set at Rs 90 (about $1.60), with full pay for twelve weeks of maternity leave and two-thirds pay for sick days. Workers in the factories get another five or so rupees a day as they are considered “technical.” This applies to spraying teams in the field as well. The extra money is known as “pay-of-post.” Wages do not go down if a garden loses money.
But wages are only part of labor expenses. On top of salaries, a garden covers medicine and education costs. It contributes to a provident fund for retirement of fifteen days per each year of work, so that after forty years a worker receives the equivalent of six hundred days’ pay. Babies get formula, infants get child care (allowing mothers to work), and children get schooling. Upon death, the garden provides wood for a pyre or a casket, depending on belief or preference. Per week, each permanent worker is allotted just over two pounds of rice plus eighteen ounces for each minor dependent, and five pounds of atta flour plus twenty-four ounces for each minor dependent for making flatbreads. And, of course, tea. Clean drinking water is provided, as well as blankets, rubber boots, firewood, and lime to whitewash their houses. Some estates encourage farming by giving tools and seeds for growing cardamom, ginger, turmeric, and oranges.
Positions are hereditary. When a plucker retires, she can pass her right to a position on the estate to one of her children. Or sell it.
“Only in tea plantations are you taken care of from birth to death,” Sandeep Mukherjee of the DTA said. In 2013, these additional items were valued by the Indian Tea Association at Rs 93.97 per worker per day, just above the daily wage.
Talking to a handful of men who grew up on Makaibari, the perquisite they remember most fondly as children was getting balls and boots to play on the estate’s rough soccer pitch—a barren, flat expanse of dirt that drops immediately off to a nearly vertical ravine—among themselves but also in highly competitive intergarden games. While sport across India is dominated by cricket, Darjeeling (and Sikkim) is soccer country, and young boys frequently wear knockoff maroon-and-blue-striped Barça jerseys with, ideally, MESSI and the number 10 stenciled in gold across the back.
* * *
* The British spell their name with a u—Gurkahs—though around Darjeeling it always has an o. They generally prefer to be called Indian Gorkha.
* The two are similar umbrella organizations. The DTA is older, larger—it represents about three-fourths of Darjeeling’s gardens—and more active in labor issues.
CHAPTER 13
Midnight’s Planters
India gained independence on August 15, 1947. A new era for the country ensued—and for Darjeeling tea. Many European owners sold their estates to wealthy Indians, perhaps believing they would never enjoy the same authority they had before.1 In some cases, suppliers became owners. Local contractors, for instance, supplied wood for chests used to pack tea and, over the years, accrued credit. They tallied the IOUs and then paid the difference between what they were owed and the value of the estate.2
The changeover often meant that the new owners had fewer ties to the land. “Darjeeling’s old managers had been rooted in the soil; they were linked to the pioneer planters and closely connected to each other through business or by marriage. Plantation labour accepted them as heaven-sent p
atriarchs. Tea was more than an industry, it was a way of life. The new proprietors were often wealthy businessmen who cut costs, demanded quick profits and operated long-distance.”3 They were looking closer at bottom lines than traditions.
During the nineteenth century, estates had been planted out in a forty-forty-twenty scheme: 40 percent for the tea crop, 40 percent left wild as a natural buffer and soil anchor, and the remainder for housing and workers’ facilities. But many of the new crop of owners had terraces removed, shade trees cut to plant more tea shrubs, and allowed encroachment on the natural portions, all of which destabilized the land and caused topsoil losses. Following the industrial development so strongly advocated by the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the new owners embraced the latest generation of chemical applications. Fascinated by science and believing that it “must be made the handmaiden of economic progress,” Nehru was keen to make India a modern, industrialized nation as quickly as possible,4 with farming a priority. “Everything else can wait,” he said not long after independence, “but not agriculture.”
“Until 1955–56 there were no chemicals in tea. It was organic,” said Marybong’s Vijay Dhancholia. That was when India began striving for food independence, Dhancholia explained, instead of buying “third-rate stuff from Australia and the USA” to feed the country’s surging population. Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan (Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer) was a catchphrase coined in 1965 by the country’s second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, to cheer on India’s soldiers battling Pakistan along the Kashmir border, as well as farmers in their agricultural revolution. Fueling that modernizing sprint and spirit were chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. The 1966–67 harvesting year marked the onset of the green revolution in India, a term that didn’t refer to the contemporary sense of natural or organic farming but rather making the best use of higher-yielding varieties and chemical inputs to increase production. This began a cycle of using progressively larger amounts of such inputs just to keep yields from falling.