In the season of political chaiwallahs, a lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched book takes us back to the days of the pioneers who gave us our chai. This is my column, Fortune Cookie, which appeared in the Op-Ed page of Mail Today on April 10, 2014, Delhi's election day.
By Sourish Bhattacharyya
THIS IS the season of the chaiwallah.
Mani Shankar Aiyar may not consider the tea business to be good enough to
produce a prime ministerial candidate, but India is the world's second largest
producer of tea, rolling out 1.11 billion kilograms of tea. And we consume a
fifth of the tea that the world produces.
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| Rekha Sarin and Rajan Kapoor's encyclopaedic book, Chai: The Experience of Indian Tea (Niyogi Books; Rs 1,995), is a riveting read studded with information. Enjoy it with a cup of your favourite chai! Image: Courtesy of Trustea.org |
The Indian side of the tea story was waiting to be told with
all the colour and the chutzpah associated with the industry, but the previous
accounts of it, by corporate historian D.K. Taknet and tea auctioneer Prafull
Goradia, weren't the most riveting reads. Chai:
The Experience of Indian Tea (Niyogi Books; Rs 1,995), by freelance writer
and floral decorator Rekha Sarin and businessman and award-winning photographer
Rajan Kapoor, therefore, comes like a refreshing whiff of (what else?) a nicely
brewed Darjeeling First Flush.
Brilliantly produced and lavishly illustrated, Chai travels back and forth in time,
blending history with the present. It starts by taking readers on a pan-Indian
journey, making us savour tea laced with peppercorns and sometimes nutmeg in
Kerala, or the khade chammach ki chai
(the tea is said to have so much sugar that the spoon can literally stand in
the cup!) served at the Irani restaurants of Hyderabad, or the tea that
accompanies a meal of aloo parantha
and dal tadka with eggs at Kolkata's Russel Punjabi Dhaba, or the milk-laden
expressions of Brooke Bond Super Dust that draw hundreds daily to Moosa Tea
Stall at the old Fort St George in Chennai.
'India Runs on Chai', declares the tag line of Chai Point,
the hugely successful tea delivery service conceived by Harvard Business School
alumnus Amuleek Singh Bijral and mentored by his professor, Tarun Khanna. After
reading Chai, you'll be struck by the
irony of this fact, for the East India Company was initially most reluctant to
recognise the fact that tea was growing in the wild in Assam and that the
Singhpo tribe had been drinking tea forever, a discovery made by Robert Bruce,
a Scottish tradesman, on a tip-off from a local nobleman, Maniram Dutta Barua,
in 1823.
The Company was happy earning heaps of silver out of Chinese
tea, which it exchanged with opium grown in India. Britain fought two Opium
Wars (1839-42; 1856-58) to protect this nefarious trade, but then, China
started growing opium and soon became the world's largest producer of the
poppy. In all this, the gainer was Indian tea, because first the Company and
then the British Raj saw in it the means to counter the Chinese tea monopoly.
The tautly edited book glides through history to bring to
life the drama behind the rise of chai:
the pioneering efforts of Charles Alexander Bruce, Robert's brother, to
propagate Assamese tea; the formation of the Assam Company, the world's first
tea enterprise, with Rabindranath Tagore's grandfather, 'Prince' Dwarkanath, on
the board of directors, in 1839; the hanging of Maniram in 1858 for daring to
plant tea in competition to the British entrepreneurs; Scottish botanist Robert
Fortune's successful attempts to sneak into out-of-bounds Chinese gardens and
filch 20,000 plants of the best black and green tea for Darjeeling; and the hazardous
journeys and back-breaking hardships faced by the early planters: they had to
store rice, for instance, in their socks and hang them on the walls to prevent
their food from being eaten away by rats.
No challenge, though, was big enough to prevent tea from
becoming the massive enterprise it eventually turned out to be. Rosheswar Barua
became the first Indian to establish and own six tea estates. Marwaris such as
Senai Ram Lohia, travelling on camel back and on foot from Ratangarh in
Rajasthan, reached Dibrugarh in Assam as far back as 1861, because they were told
"there's gold growing there". These are the chaiwallahs who created the national enterprise. From Dibrugarh to
the Nilgiris and Munnar, to the foot of the Dhaulagiri in Kangra, this is one
flavourful ride you must take with a cup of chai
by your side.
GET YOUR BRAGGING RIGHTS FROM SINGLE MALTS
IF YOU haven't hosted a home appreciation session dedicated
to single malts, you cannot claim your bragging rights. This is the new fad
going viral around the country, as single malts gain new followers in Tier II
and III cities, such as Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Pune and Kochi.
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Home appreciation sessions dedicated to single
malts are the new style statements, according
to Rajiv Bhatia, Director, William Grant & Sons,
the makers of Glenfiddich 12YO
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The most prominent Indian face of Scotland's single malts
industry, and a member of the exclusive club of Keepers of the Quaiche, Rajiv
Bhatia, shared this information with me on the day he was going to give away BestCollegeArt.com's
Best Emerging Artist Award 2014 to Chetnaa Verma. Being a Delhiite and having
just set up the India office of William Grant & Sons, makers of the
best-selling single malt, Glendfiddich 12YO, Bhatia seemed to be prepared with
an answer when I asked why international alcoholic beverage heavy hitters, from
Diageo and Pernod Ricard to Moet Hennessy, were setting up Indian operations.
"The market is sufficiently large for companies like
ours to invest in India," he said, pinpointing three reasons for the
consumption of single malts becoming the new middle-class statement of upward
mobility: growing international travel; success of the arrival lounge duty-free
stores (buoyed by the response, William Grant India has unveiled its exclusive
Cask Collection at T3); and the proliferation of upscale retail outlets that
stock premium liquor brands. Back in 1907, Charles Gordon, a founder of William
Grant & Sons, travelled across India to sell Scotch to the maharajas. His
successors have cast their net wider.
DELHI ROMANCES THE DIM
SUM, AND HOW!
WHEN the Yo! China promoters -- Ashish Kapur, Ajay Saini and
Joydeep Singh -- launched dimsumbros not long ago, I remember asking them
whether a single-specialty restaurant could do well in a market that swore by
'multi-cuisine'. Kapur, the most articulate of the three, reasoned that the
phenomenal popularity of the dim sum served at Yo! China outlets gave them the
confidence to launch dimsumbros at Ambience Mall, Gurgaon.
Ironically, the counter on the Yo! China website that used to
track dim sum consumption at the outlets stopped working after reaching the
10,000,007 (ten million and seven) mark many months ago, but dimsumbros, despite
its failed expansion to New Friends Colony, has struck a responsive chord with
Delhi/NCR's diners with such winners as the Almond Prawns with Wasabi Mayo, Delectable
Salmon Roll and Scallop Sui Mai with 'Caviar' (more likely, flying fish roe!).
Dimsumbros has democratised the dim sum lunches that have become
an institution at Taipan, The Oberoi's rooftop Chinese restaurant, and at Royal
China, Nehru Place, where regulars order dim sum platters without even looking
at the menu. Set'Z at DLF Emporio, meanwhile, can claim credit for creating a
loyal market for cheung fun, the
light yet flavourful rice noodle rolls. And soon, yet another dim sum-only
restaurant, Dim Cha, will lift its shutter for what its 20-something owner
expects to be a surge of humanity at the N-Block Market, Greater Kailash-I.
Delhiites seem to love their dim sum, which is exactly why
Dharmesh Karmokar, a Mumbai-based food consultant and serial restaurateur, has
launched a dim sum menu with 100 offerings at Nom Nom, the sprawling Pan Asian
restaurant promoted by B.K. Modi at The Ashok. We not only have more choices
than before, but restaurateurs like Karmokar now travel the extra mile to make
sure they don't duplicate the momos that the cottage industry of roadside
sellers hawks across Delhi. They have the right steamers and use the
appropriate flour.
The menu at Nom Nom, which introduces squid, octopus, emu
meat and even eggs stuffed with fruit to good effect, shows where the dim sum
business is headed. Dim sum, without doubt, is this season's khao suey.
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