by Jeff Koehler
“It took me about ten years to be able to talk about it,” Rajah said in the spacious, rambling hilltop home (humbly referred to as a bungalow) that has been home to generations of Banerjees. He wore a sweat suit with a silver tips T-shirt pulled over the zippered jacket top. “Now I can talk about it rationally. They would have found me certifiably crazy.”
He knew he wasn’t mad that August day forty-five years ago. Although he didn’t fully understand the experience yet, Rajah knew instantly that he had to spend the rest of his life on Makaibari. At dinner that night he told his parents that he was staying and would become a tea planter. He didn’t explain what had made him suddenly change his mind. They were puzzled, but happily accepted his decision.
Rajah’s well-honed stories, studded with bits of original wisdom, retold for visitors who arrive almost daily from around the globe, come across not so much fresh and spontaneous as original and sincere. In particular, hearing his anecdote of being thrown from the horse, almost verbatim to how he has recorded it elsewhere, remains, like a Greek drama whose story is known but masterfully handled onstage, a riveting experience. Fittingly, details of the fall lend it the essence of a fable, including the animal that startled the horse and set the event into motion. In the Indian tradition, one of Lord Vishnu’s reincarnations was as Varaha, a boar whose rooting around in the earth and turning over soil showed him how to till and plow, teaching man cultivation. Today the Indian wild boar (Sus scrofa cristatus; suar in Hindi, varaha in Sanskrit) remains a sacred animal associated with agriculture3 and also fertility, due to its digging deep in the earth to allow for the growth of shoots.4
Rajah is a master raconteur. He loves to talk, to educate, to be listened to. Pontificate might be the best word. (He keeps to the first person, although there would be little surprise if he switched, from time to time, to the third.) He is brilliant and aggrandizing, curious, arrogant but generous, preachy but unique, with flair, charm, and rare magnetism. Had he not taken up tea planting, he could have become one of those legendary teachers, the kind at boarding school who inspire student rebellions and at university that pack lecture halls and have, year after year, a loyal following of not just the curious or needy but also the most brilliant. Instead, he remains in his rural, isolated tea garden tending to its daily needs. “The world comes to you. Look: you came,” he said. Rajah’s vocabulary is rich, colorful, and precise, laid out not so much the way a jeweler displays his fanciest wares, but the way a butcher wields his tools to work, in order to provoke and persuade. Or maybe the way a jester handles his props: puns and intricate allusions come quickly. His sense of humor is ripe and, not infrequently, cutting. Guests are challenged and interrogated. (“Come on! What do you taste? You’re a gourmand. You should know this!”) Ideas, offered with a brawny, combative intellectual persuasiveness, are original, iconoclastic, and often bewildering. Too frequently, guests are muted and can only nod into their cups of tea. While he speaks in polished paragraphs and dislikes being interrupted, he is genuinely interested and inquisitive, with little patience for trivialities. The effort to reach Makaibari is too great, and his time too limited. Guests should listen but respond, clearly and specifically; they should be clever and preferably confident—or come with a skin as thick as that of buffaloes, whose heads are hung on the wall of the sitting room and outside his office.
Once deciding to stay on Makaibari, he wanted to do more than simply maintain the long-running traditions of the estate as handed down by his ancestors. To respond to the plea from the forest, the farm needed to evolve into a place more in sync with nature’s rhythms.
By balancing the five internal senses together with external forces, you have harmony. “If you are in harmony, and you are a farmer, then you have healthy soil,” Rajah said in the quiet house. He slurped his tea. From the first flush, it had been recently fired, locking in the fresh greenness of the young buds, the aroma of the hills. The liquor shone whisky gold in the cup. “I decided then to dedicate myself to healthy soil.”
So began what he calls the greatest voyage of his life. He would not only make some of the finest vintages of Darjeeling tea ever produced, set a world record at auction—“I don’t care about records,” he says, but rarely fails to mention this one—and get some of the highest prices for tea anywhere, but also unravel the three critical questions that he believes assail us all, questions we hope remain dormant: Where do we come from? What are we doing here? Where are we going?
“I was seeking the flavor in the balance sheet of life,” he said, repeating one of his favorite phrases.
• • •
Rajah’s father, Pasupati Nath (P. N.) Banerjee, possessed a deep passion for hunting—and a notoriously accurate shot. Both are evident in the airy sitting room of the Makaibari bungalow. Surrounding a photograph of P. N. standing erect in his Sam Browne belt and wide-brimmed hat is a dusty menagerie of stuffed trophies: tigers squatting nonchalantly on their haunches with yawning, fang-filled mouths; a matching pair of stuffed leopards and the skin of a third stretching across a wall; a heavy rack of deer antlers. The opaque, amber-colored eyes of an enormous buffalo head mounted on the wall gaze out over the room.
Hunting in the estate’s forests one day as a young man, not long after taking over from his father, P. N. was engulfed in a sudden seasonal rainstorm. Waiting it out at the edge of the forest, he noticed that water running off the planted sections of the garden was murky with sediment. The estate’s wealth—its nutrient-rich topsoil—was being washed away in the rain. Yet rivulets of water flowing out of the woods ran clear. Seeing how the fallen leaves from the trees offered a barrier that was preventing erosion, he realized the need for a similar solution for the tea bushes.5
He began searching, and in 1945 workers started mulching. They spread loppings and cuttings from various grasses and plants on the estate like an insulating blanket across the ground between the bases of bushes.
Mulching accomplishes numerous things. It absorbs the area’s heavy rain, from the short, powerful bursts before the monsoon through the steady downpours during the rainy season itself. This prevents soil erosion as well, helping the moisture to be absorbed into the earth rather than just running off it. The mulch layer protects the soil against evaporation during the dry season and periods of drought. Underneath, the loamy earth is rich in humus and decomposition. Mulching also prevents weeds by depriving them of light and acts as a gentle buffer between soil and air, allowing earthworms to flourish and work in the topmost layer of soil, churning and better aerating the earth. And it helps build topsoil.
Something more profound was going on here, too, Rajah explained. “With the mulching, the tea became part of the woodlands.”
This was the first step in Makaibari’s organic journey. However, P. N. continued to use chemical applications. Later, Rajah worried that the spraying was killing the rich organisms that were flourishing from the mulching and even giving animals insecticide poisoning. While Rajah was keen to stop the practice, his father was still in charge of Makaibari. Workers called P. N. burra sahib, big boss, and Rajah chota sahib, little boss. (Most of those living in Makaibari’s villages still refer to him as chota sahib, at least when talking about him. It is used on the garden not unaffectionately.)
In a hidden corner of the estate, on a steep slope of tea among a heavily wooded section that was rarely visited, even by his father, Rajah and two of Makaibari’s most senior workers secretly tended a patch of bushes. Manuring at night, it took the men nearly a month to carry organic compost from a nearby village on Makaibari and spread it around the site. Rajah was able to have the tea plucked and processed apart, and as he tells it in his book, his father frequently commented on the exceptional quality of the leaves during the batch tastings, probing the production manager for their specific source. Rajah managed to kept the secret for the whole harvest year before finally revealing his stealthy, organic undertaking.6
Once party to the subterfuge and having tasted the differe
nce, P. N. supported his son’s idea. P. N. provided cows for manure, workers learned composting techniques, and the estate began converting away from chemical applications.
But the end of using chemicals wouldn’t come until Rajah took over Makaibari. In the early 1980s, India’s tea industry struggled severely. National taxes and labor costs rose sharply, exports to the UK plummeted, and Kenyan and Sri Lankan teas offered stiff competition on the global market. Prices dropped. Profit margins dwindled. Dozens of estates in Darjeeling were abandoned; the remainder strained to survive. Rajah’s father retired to Calcutta and thrust the running of the garden onto his son. The chota sahib had nothing to lose and launched fully into realizing his organic vision. Rajah doesn’t see it that way, though, and bristles at the notion. “I didn’t take over anything. How can you take over change? I was merely a conduit,” he insists.
Occupying one end of the upper floor of a small, two-story building fronting the factory with its green roof and corrugated, silver siding, Rajah’s office has a worn, green-and-white-patterned carpet and pale yellow walls, a pair of frayed wicker chairs, and a large desk covered with a leather mat and stacks of papers. A long, glass-fronted bookcase runs across one end of the room. Trophies, awards, and plaques crowd its top; inside, shelves overflow with books on birds and animals, generators and income-tax law, and tomes such as Will Durant’s The Age of Louis XIV and The Life of Greece. The doors to a small terrace are always thrown open to the hum of the factory and the smell of freshly fired tea. A shankha, a large conch shell associated with Hinduism, sits in a corner.
The path to organic farming began with his father, and Rajah, he finally conceded, continued to drive it forward. “I was on a mission. It was a process of slowly moving. We moved ahead a little each day.”
For buyers and consumers, being an organic farm means being a certified one. The idea for Makaibari’s getting certification was instigated by a chance meeting in 1987 with Kiran Tawadey, an elegant woman who owns Hampstead Tea, a brand of organic and Fairtrade teas that gets exported to seventeen countries. “She said, ‘There’s big bucks in it,’ but I told her, ‘I’m not in it for the bucks,’” Rajah explained.
Tawadey, then in her late twenties and just starting out in the business, was not easily dissuaded. She began introducing Rajah to the broader organic community and asked him to host an inspector on the estate. He agreed. (Why? “I can’t say no to anybody.”)
Makaibari convincingly satisfied the criteria during the inspection, and in 1988 Makaibari was duly certified organic, the first tea estate in India to be so. Rajah is deeply proud of it, although he tends to underplay it. “I became certified because a buyer wanted it,” he said in a deadpan tone.
The transition to organic was not an easy time. “All my neighbors thought I was some sort of a witch, doing witchcraft in tea, and stayed away from it, from the crazy man,” he explained in the Makaibari documentary. “It was very, very lonely the first few years.”7 Organic isolation didn’t last long. “The moment the whole garden started prospering, proving the point that eco-agriculture could be economically viable, everybody has started jumping in the bandwagon,” he said with a jaunty, upward lilt to in his voice.8 When Makaibari started achieving record prices, the bandwagon became even more popular. “I was astonishingly propelled from laughingstock to pioneer,” he wrote in his book.9
What a change in a quarter century. According to the Darjeeling Tea Association, by the end of the 2013 harvest, fifty-eight of Darjeeling’s tea gardens—an astonishing two-thirds—were certified organic with a number more in the conversion.*
Converting comes with significant consequences. “It is a costly affair,” said Jay Neogi at Ambootia, the flagship and namesake of the group with eleven organic Darjeeling gardens. Certification is expensive, organic materials cost more, and organic cow manure is in short supply in the hills.
But these are largely secondary concerns. Far more important, yields plummet. Ambootia saw its production drop from 200,000 kilograms (440,000 pounds) to 120,000 kilograms (about 265,000 pounds); it has now stabilized at 150,000 kilograms (331,000 pounds), or down 25 percent from previous amounts.
This is standard. Chamong Tee’s thirteen Darjeeling gardens all converted to organic production and generally experienced drops around 25 to 30 percent. Some were even higher. Marybong has been typical. The historic estate of the Wernickes and Louis Mandelli began the three-year process of moving from conventional to organic in 2007, the year Vijay Dhancholia took over as manager. Production went from 165,000 kilograms (375,000 pounds) to 102,000 kilograms (about 225,000 pounds) in 2012, a 40 percent loss. According to Dhancholia, a hailstorm during the first flush that year contributed to the slashed numbers, and with excellent weather conditions, he sees the garden capable of hitting 140,000 kilograms. But even that optimistic amount would still mean a 15 percent drop from the days of its conventional farming. In 2013 Marybong did significantly better but still missed that target by 10 percent, producing 126,000 kilograms, down a quarter from preconversion times.
With crop losses compounded on the accountant’s balance sheet by increased production costs, why turn organic?
“Market,” said Satish Mantri, the manager of Singbulli, a garden that stretches fourteen miles end to end through the Mirik Valley, with a conceding shrug. Singbulli completed its first fully organic year in 2013. It was a change for the garden—and Mantri. He has been a manager for nearly three decades. Neither had a choice.
“Organic is not a luxury anymore, but a necessity,” Sujoy Sengupta explained over lunch at Chamong Tee’s fifth-floor offices in a downtown-Kolkata office block called Sagar Estate. Oversize portraits hung on the walls of the empty conference room. Each had a smudge of vermilion pressed against the glass to the forehead. A marigold wreath dangled across one of the gilt frames.
Back in the late 1980s and 1990s, Sengupta explained, being organic meant something on the market. “Then, organic was more like adding an extra edge to your product.” Not now. Because so many gardens have converted, he said, “now just being organic is no longer a huge marketing advantage.”
A morning shower had drenched the city, but within an hour, the sun had come out and the humidity rose to unbearable levels. Under the loud, cyclical whir of the boxy air-conditioning unit, Sengupta mused about Marybong, a garden he knows well. After a stint in the Dooars, he had his first posting in Darjeeling at Glenburn, where he was a young assistant manager with Sanjay Sharma, then spent five years on Lingia and four on Marybong before coming to the head office in Kolkata as a tea taster and blender. Middays he is particularly distracted. Kolkata straddles the time zones of his customers in Japan, India, and Europe, and a constant cacophony of e-mails arrive on his open laptop, with messages pinging on his BlackBerry and the telephone ringing. His lunch that day went neglected as he took calls, typed quick messages, and repeatedly left the room in search of documents or numbers.
The first Chamong garden to convert was Tumsong, back in 1988. Yields fell 25 percent. The drop upon conversion is at first steep and then levels off. In theory, or at least in hope, yields should recover as the tea bushes grow stronger and build their natural resistance. But that hasn’t been the case on Tumsong or elsewhere in Darjeeling. “If it hasn’t come back in twenty-five years,” Sengupta said in a resigned tone, “it won’t.”
Contributing to the decline from conversion is the climate, but also more selective plucking, Sengupta said. “The market is demanding finer plucking.” By his calculation, though, this has accounted for only up to a 5 percent loss of yield.
The drop in output worries more than just a garden’s stakeholders. “Going organic means a loss of volume,” Sanjay Kapur said in his Delhi office. “Some estates have had a perceptive drop in quality.” The urge to bump up amounts can be great. “They want to make the one hundred thousand kilograms, not eighty thousand. So they make it up with leaf weight. Pick a bit later, pick larger leaves.” This isn’t across the board, Kap
ur was keen to stress, and many gardens remain rigorous in their plucking standards.
“We never compromise on quality,” said Sengupta over lunch. That can’t change. At its heart, Darjeeling is about offering a superior product. It will never be able to compete on volume or price. “They have to keep quality,” Vijay Sarda of Nathmulls in Darjeeling warned rather gravely. “The moment they lack quality, the industry will go down.”
To offset lower yields, the tea should get a price push in having the certified-organic label, as well as new options for sales to previously inaccessible clients, though Girish Sarda at Nathmulls cautioned, “Only if you know your market.” Gardens need to have importers lined up to buy their invoices, he stressed, namely ones from Germany, France, the UK, and Japan. “If not, you will be selling at the same price as conventional teas.”
No local market exists for organic teas: buyers in India are not willing to pay a premium for that certificate. The indifference to organic teas seems in stark contrast to the clamor for green teas almost exclusively because of their health properties. Indian consumers have no similar association with organic teas.
Just how much rise in price a tea gets by being organic remains an unknown variable, said Sengupta. There is no exact—or rough— calculation.
Even the Darjeeling tea auctioneer, Anindyo Choudhury, at J. Thomas & Co. finds it difficult to estimate. “First, is it an established garden?” he asked. “And second, who are you selling to? To packeteers and blenders—then it doesn’t matter.” They will blend with conventional teas. It must be, he stressed, “exporters selling to the niche market.” If the garden has an established name and is selling to exporters of that niche market, then it will see an increase, he said. Pushed on a number, he reluctantly and hesitantly agreed to somewhere around 5 or 10 percent.