by Jeff Koehler
But does biodynamic tea actually taste better? Does planting according to the moon’s orbit and the position of the constellations make a difference in that final judgment of a tea when it’s sipped from the cup? Does spraying the leaves with ground silica crystals that have been buried in cow horns give deeper muscatel flavors? A more nuanced body?
While some argue passionately that indeed biodynamic tea does taste better—and can point to stellar client lists as proof—this is, in many ways, not the main object. Rather, biodynamic farming seeks more than merely taste. “Biodynamics is a human service to the earth and its creatures, not just a method for increasing production or for providing healthy food,” wrote Storl.21 Or flavorful teas. “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings,”22 wrote the legendary Japanese philosopher and farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, who visited Makaibari when he was ninety years old, in his manifesto on natural farming, The One-Straw Revolution. Approvingly, Rajah Banerjee quotes this line in his own book.
As Steiner’s comment about stirring slurry reflects, biodynamic farming is done consciously. The passion is what matters, the reverential feelings that the farmer has for his crops and the land. “Whatever we do,” said the young Bihari field manager on Ambootia, “it is about nature.”
Such feelings toward nature have a long lineage in India. “Hindus, with their reverence for sacred rivers, mountains, forests and animals, have always been close to nature,” wrote Ranchor Prime in Hinduism and Ecology.23 Trees, Prime noted, have an important status: the great forests that once sheltered Lord Rama and his beautiful wife during their years of exile, and Krishna and his flute as he danced with friends and herded cows; the big shade trees—“silent symbols of India’s spiritual roots”24—under which travelers rested from the heat and gurus passed on wisdom to disciples. “O King of trees! I bow before you. Brahma is in your roots, Vishnu is in your body, Shiva is in your branches. In every one of your leaves there is a heavenly being,” claims an ancient verse quoted by Prime.25 This early Vedic tradition of placing a high value on trees was passed down.26 Two thousand years ago the ancient Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus took note: “To anything they have started to cultivate they give divine status, especially to trees, violating which constitutes a capital offense.”27
“Most people farm for profits,” Rajah Banerjee said in the Makaibari documentary. “They’re looking for the flavor in their balance sheet. When we talk about the flavor and balance sheet of life, we are talking about healing the land and the tea and creating an environment whereby man becomes a rhythm of nature. We are not protecting or conserving forests. It’s the reverse process. Man becomes a rhythm, a part of the forest, an extension of the forest.”
In his bungalow’s sitting room Rajah proclaimed, “The creature who wins against nature destroys itself.”*
Farming isn’t a battle against nature, but a partnership with it. It is respecting the basics of nature in action and ensuring that they continue.
We do not live nor farm in a void. There is a “connection between our environment and our way of life,” wrote Prime. “A way of life does not exist in a vacuum. It is based on a way of thinking: a philosophy of life.”28
Over a cup of freshly processed first flush tea, Rajah said, “When you eat or drink something, it becomes a material part of your being.”
* * *
* In August 2014, Ambootia’s factory, built in 1920 and completely updated and modernized in 2009, burnt to the ground. The fire started around nine P.M., quickly engulfed the building, and by the time the fire brigade made it from Kurseong, all was lost. Plucking resumed the following day while the embers still smoldered. Until the new factory can be rebuilt, the green leaves will be processed at one of the group’s other gardens. After the factory at Monteviot burned down in 2004, the same year it was acquired by Ambootia, its green leaf was sent to Ambootia. Now, with Ambootia’s, it will get trucked to Moondakotee and Nagri tea estates for processing until the factory can be rebuilt.
* This echoes a line by the celebrated American environmental campaigner Rachel Carson: “Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
CHAPTER 18
Initiatives
For Darjeeling tea to keep its position on the top shelf of the world’s most distinguished products—or even, perhaps, for it to merely survive—the industry must go beyond simply turning 100 percent organic, offering new varieties of teas, opening new markets, or interesting more tea drinkers within India. The challenge is less in the soil, bushes, or leaves themselves than with the people who reside on the estates. A tea garden needs to be not just a sustainable, self-sufficient farm, but a sustainable, self-sufficient community. It’s not merely about creating well-made teas but also having a stable workforce. While Darjeeling’s celebrated flavor stems from leaves, its future rests in the people who pluck them. If you can’t get the leaves off the bush and processed, everything else becomes irrelevant.
The rapid rise of staggeringly high worker absenteeism in the last few years has moved this to the forefront of urgent threats. Of the major hurdles ahead, the gardens can—and need to—be proactive in immediately tackling this one.
“We know where they are going,” said Sanjay Sharma about Glenburn’s disappearing workforce, whose absenteeism has suddenly and swiftly climbed to around 30 percent. “We have to head off and head back workers. The only way is being able to offer them better employment, better quality of life. It’s a hard one. It’s easier said than done.”
To put the critical challenge in the simplest of terms: the future of Darjeeling depends on motivating a marginalized, low-paid labor force to continue working on the estates. This is particularly challenging when a single kilo of tea can sell for more than they make in the entire year, an especially stark notion at blue-chip gardens. Makaibari might get record prices, but workers receive the same daily wages as on every other garden in the district.
Tea gardens are based on a Raj-era system that remains largely in place. “The colonial foundation is not working,” Rajah Banerjee said in autumn. “It’s broken.” A fundamental change in the serflike structure needs to evolve, to include more worker involvement, even ownership, to make them a dynamic, integrated part of the estate—and a party to its successes. “We need to look out an alternative window,” he said.
“It’s about partnership, not ownership,” insists Rajah. He refuses to call those who work on Makaibari laborers or even workers and instead refers to them as community activists or participants. This isn’t only about semantics, but, rather, deeply invested involvement. “They are not workers but a community. It’s their home. The key is in community participation.”
The 1991 creation of the Makaibari Joint Body (MBJB) was one initiative to encourage this. The committee, comprised of elected members from the estate’s seven villages, is mostly women. Elections take place every three years; the only permanent member is Rajah. The committee makes decisions about the garden and on microloans for projects such as homestay constructions. It runs a nursery and, in 2012, opened a small library with books to lend and Wi-Fi-connected computers to use. While three of the four computers were not working by autumn 2013, it was still offering free computer lessons to people on Makaibari. Even with class sizes of twenty, the continual waiting list reflects the program’s popularity.
Sometimes partnership comes in subtle forms. “Encouragement is partnership,” Rajah said one cold night in the spacious drawing room of the Makaibari bungalow. “Empowerment is partnership. What do marginalized women that have been empowered invest in?” He mimed jiggling an old-fashioned waist belt heavy with coins. “They invest in the best primary education. That creates awareness.” As he spoke, he made slow loops around the room. “Then they invest in the best secondary school. This builds capacity.” He stopped for a moment near his wife, Srirupa, who huddled close to an electric heater that reflected glowing
orange in the lenses of her eyeglasses. “With awareness and capacity you create character, and if you have character, you can succeed at anything.” He smiled, then said emphatically, “That’s what you get when you empower the ladies!”
Estates across Darjeeling are trying various initiatives that range from reforesting—giving out varieties of trees, including bamboo, which has a multitude of uses—to harvesting rainwater and buying vehicles to ply the roads as taxis. But the ancient cow has been the base for the most inspired schemes.
“A thoroughly healthy farm should be able to produce within itself all that it needs,” Rudolf Steiner stated in his second agricultural lecture.1 At the center of the farm and its health is the cow, both in traditional Vedic practice as well as in organic and biodynamic farming.
The cow has long been sacred in India, valued but also protected. In ancient India, killing one was a serious crime tantamount to killing a Brahman and punishable by death.2 The animal has an elemental motherliness, with its milk replacing that of a baby’s mother. Cows can convert grasses and roughage that are inedible and indigestible to humans into milk, which in turn can become butter and ghee (clarified butter), yogurt, and cheese, excellent sources of protein but also some of the most important offerings for the gods. The cow was also key to rural life by providing manure for fertilizer as well as fuel. Their leather could be used for sandals, garments, and receptacles, and they could be trained to pull plows and carts.3 As a large poster hanging in Ambootia’s tasting room titled “The Cow Story” illustrates, it was the most useful of all domesticated animals.
The cow’s importance remains so on many of Darjeeling’s tea estates, especially as the number of organic gardens has dramatically increased in the last decade. Gardens generally do not own the cows; rather, they belong to those living in the estate’s villages, who sell the manure for organic fertilizer to the garden while keeping the milk to drink or to sell at the market.
Always a pioneer, Rajah went a step further in utilizing cow dung on Makaibari decades ago. Inspired by Gandhi’s notion of swadeshi—self-sufficiency or self-reliance—Rajah used a component from the Mahatma’s bucolic vision and offered a way to turn the dung into a clean and renewable fuel. Biogas is created from a slurry of cow manure and water via anaerobic digestion. The organic matter breaks down in a biogas plant (also called a digester), and a hood traps the methane created. This can be stored and then burned as fuel, generally for cooking.
One of the biggest advantages of biogas is that it reduces the need to cut firewood from the surrounding hillsides to use for cooking fuel. Cutting fewer trees shores up the soil of Darjeeling’s fragile hillsides against erosion, slows the spread of deforestation, and helps stop landslides that claw away at the slopes. In additon, homes become healthier by the cutting of smoke from the kitchens, and this can improve the quality of life—and often the economic circumstances of the family. Collecting firewood was considered a woman’s job, and for many women was their single most time-consuming task, taking three or more hours a day. Being free of this provides a significant amount of time to dedicate to other pursuits, including ones that generate income. It created what Rajah calls “grassroots entrepreneurs,” who began selling their organic milk, planting and tending patches of vegetables (to eat at home or sell in the market), making paper, brewing millet wine, and opening homestays. This “income away from tea,” as he calls it, complements a household’s wages from the estate.
Such dynamic programs on Makaibari have not been without missteps. Rajah’s first foray into biogas used a community-size unit that failed within months. He revisited the idea in spring of 1988 with individual digesters. With people more personally responsible, it worked better. But visits throughout the 2013 harvest to Makaibari showed few signs of cows, and the hoods of all seven biogas digesters in Upper Makaibari were cracked and out of use.
“Maintenance is always a problem,” agreed a small group of men living in different villages around the estate. They spoke of having cows a handful of years ago—“in the years of biogas.” One said, “But it was too much work cutting grass for them.” It was easier in the beginning when they could find fodder closer. One of the men, who lives in Upper Makaibari near the factory, estimated that his village had just four or five cows, with perhaps forty to fifty in all of Makaibari. And not from any garden program. “Bought with their own money,” he said. They sell the cow dung to the garden.
While Rajah’s bucolic biogas dream remains unrealized, most homes now have gas stoves that run on propane cylinders bought in the small shops around the garden. Cooking with wood, though, has not disappeared. Gas is expensive and generally reserved for the midday meal, when time is limited. Most families still use wood to cook morning and evening meals. To warm their homes on winter evenings, they burn tea-garden prunings. No one, the men said, has heating.
Still, Rajah offers what he has done on Makaibari as a framework. “We’ve been part of creating something that could bring dynamic change,” he said in his office. “It has turned into a movement.” He was referring not only to the natural methods of farming, but also something deeper. “When you come into Makaibari, you feel a part of it.”
• • •
Darjeeling is a favorite for visitors, and recent spells of political stability have seen numbers in town shoot up with both Indian and foreign guests. The 2010–11 season saw 135,000 domestic tourists. That number climbed to 430,000 for 2011–12 and to 730,000 for 2012–13.4
Often affectionately calling the city Darj, Indian visitors stroll the Chowrasta (and let their kids be led around it on scruffy ponies), browse the vintage photos in Das Studio, and sit on Keventer’s roof terrace, where, in Anurag Basu’s 2012 Bollywood blockbuster Barfi!, Ranbir Kapoor unsuccessfully proposed to Ileana D’Cruz, then climbed the nearby clock tower to turn back the time fifteen minutes, as if it had never happened. Families jam the Hasty Tasty for familiar Indian dishes, buy knitted woolen hats with tassels in the bazaar for the cold evenings, and pick up packets of tea at Nathmulls to take home as gifts.
Darjeeling’s tea and tea gardens are clearly a draw, the gardens’ lazy carpeting of green across the area a scenic attraction. But tea tourism is one initiative that remains largely untested, yet is full of promise. While West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, is keen on the concept, complaints remain about the convoluted nature of converting land from agricultural to tourism use. The gardens, who lease their land from the state government, can only transform a mere fraction of their estates to dedicated tourism usage: just five acres (two hectares), with actual construction limited to a single acre (the remaining four acres are for landscaping and beautifying the property).5
So far, just a handful of gardens have tapped into the concept and allowed people to be guests on a working estate. Each has taken a different approach.
To offer some of the many visitors who turn up at Makaibari a place to stay, the estate instigated a homestay program in 2005. According to Nayan Lama, its young coordinator, twenty-two families are engaged in the program, fifteen in the village near the factory and another seven in Phoolbari (Flower Village), on the lower reaches of Makaibari. Using microloans from the Makaibari Joint Body, each host family has constructed a separate room for guests and an outdoor Western-style toilet. For Rs 600 (about $10) per person, visitors get a room, three meals, visits to the tea fields and factory, tastings, and plenty of tea to drink. Primarily European and North American college-age students are attracted, but Indian tourists have begun staying, too. While accommodations can be rustic at best and susceptible to power outages and water shortages, the opportunity to experience a tea estate at ground level is unique and especially tantalizing at one as well-known and innovative as Makaibari.
“Should you plan to interact positively with our working philosophy and get the true pulse and insouciance of the Makaibari spirit,” Rajah Banerjee replied after an initial inquiry, “then a homestay with one of our community members is recommende
d.”
The money for these, Rajah likes to point out, “goes to the woman of the house.” Clearly he trusts women more than men with fiscal diligence. While he helped get it off the ground, “now it runs itself,” he said proudly. “I don’t keep a penny.”
One of the families involved is that of Maya Davi Chettrini, the first female field supervisor, and her husband, a stocky forest ranger who helps guard the estate’s woodlands. The guest room is painted ocher red and lime green and has a pair of beds, a tall stack of soft blankets, and views down over the tea-covered valley. Dinner in the front room one spring night included dal and a tangy stewed-chicken dish with plenty of aromatic long-grain white rice, which was eaten by candlelight during an hours-long electrical outage.
Homestay mornings start not long after sunrise, with the chickens crowing and general movement among the small but dense village of Upper Makaibari. A typical breakfast includes a masala omelet (with minced tomatoes, onions, and green chilies from one of the pots alongside the house), aloo dum (spicy potatoes) dabbed with heady mango pickle, and plenty of freshly fried parathas (unleavened bread).
While guests have a second cup of Makaibari tea from an ample thermos and begin planning out their day on the garden, Maya shoulders a small cloth carryall with a bottle of water, takes from a hook outside the door her red umbrella, bleached and tattered by the elements, and heads to the fields to work.
Glenburn Tea Estate (and now Boutique Hotel) has staked out the opposite end of the tea-garden experience. Whereas Makaibari offers A Day in the Life of a Tea Plucker, Glenburn’s luxurious experience is A Day in the Life of a Tea Planter.