In 1903 the Raj Taxed Tea Exports to Help Pay for Selling Tea to Indians. In 1930 More Than 90 Percent of the Crop Still Left the Country.

By 1935 India’s tea planters were holding more than a hundred million pounds of tea that nobody would buy. The Great Depression had pulled world prices down, and a leaf that had always been grown for export had nowhere to go.

The industry’s answer went out on the road. Mohona Kanjilal, in her food history of Calcutta, quotes the scholar Philip Lutgendorf on what followed: tea propagandists “were now dispatched in the hundreds, sometimes in motorized ‘tea vans’, equipped to dispense millions of cups of free tea and comparable numbers of ‘pice packets’.” A pice was a coin of very low value. Years earlier at Howrah station in Calcutta, the same industry had handed passengers free cups of prepared tea and sold them paper packets of tea, “of such quality that would not find favour at auctions,” for one pice each.

India grew tea, and Indians mostly did not drink it. The campaign that changed that is the clearest case in this series of a food habit built on purpose. The same decades brought a factory-made fat to Indian kitchens and an export-first farm economy, and both are covered below. Earlier pieces in the series cover what India cooked before chilli and how the potato and tomato arrived.

A cess on exports, and a trial that failed

Lutgendorf, writing in the journal Thesis Eleven in 2012, describes the tea grown in British India as “intended solely for export to the West.” It passed through the port of Calcutta and, from 1861, the Calcutta auction market. Only “a tiny fraction of the native population” tried it, in Lutgendorf’s words as Kanjilal quotes him, “principally the Anglophile bhadralok elite as well as ‘office babus’ employed by British firms.” The bhadralok were Bengal’s educated gentry, and babus were clerks.

Tea advertising in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Lutgendorf adds, “was largely aimed at resident Britishers and the Anglophone elite who aspired to their lifestyle.” Kanjilal draws the business conclusion. As long as export returns stayed healthy, she writes, “there was little inducement to pursue a domestic market that would inevitably yield a lower return.”

The first try came in 1901, when Viceroy Lord Curzon commissioned an experiment to introduce tea to Indians in selected areas. Kanjilal reports modest success, and the effort was dropped in 1904. The Indian Tea Association, the planters’ body founded in 1881, said in its annual report that three years of effort had not produced results good enough to suggest a promising market. Kanjilal adds that a long-standing taste for drinks such as sharbat, a sweet fruit or flower cordial, made ordinary buyers balk.

In 1903 Curzon introduced the Tea Cess Bill. A cess is a tax set aside for a stated purpose. The Tea Board of India dates its own origin to that bill, which put a levy on tea exports and directed the money to promoting Indian tea both inside and outside India.

The Tea Cess Committee that spent it, Kanjilal writes, “made sporadic and small-scale attempts in select public venues.” The most important venue was the railways. At Howrah the committee gave away free cups, sold one-pice packets, and set up tea stalls to show the public the British method. That meant pouring boiled water over the leaves in a china teapot, straining the liquid into a cup after it had brewed, and adding some milk and sugar.

By 1930, Kanjilal concludes, “only a small fraction of the Indian population had developed an affinity for tea and more than 90 per cent of the crop continued to be exported.”

A hundred million pounds unsold

It took the Depression, which began in 1929, to make the home market look attractive. International tea prices dropped sharply in the early 1930s, and by 1935 planters were facing the unsold surplus of more than a hundred million pounds. Around then the Tea Cess Committee was reorganised as the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board, a forerunner of today’s Tea Board of India, which was constituted on 1 April 1954 under the Tea Act of 1953.

With an expanded budget, Kanjilal writes, the Expansion Board “embarked upon the largest and most aggressive marketing campaign in the history of the Indian tea industry.” The campaign used the vans and propagandists described above, plus colourful signs in Indian languages painted by leading commercial artists. Enamel placards went up at railway stations, markets and festivals. They advertised tea and its health benefits, and they gave detailed instructions for the “correct” British way to brew it. In the 1930s and 1940s, Kanjilal says, vehicles decorated with large kettles toured the towns of Bengal.

Women were a deliberate target. Lutgendorf describes demonstration teams “dispatched to festivals and bazaars and even (via all-female units) to the inner quarters of conservative, purdah-observing households.” Purdah is the seclusion of women from men outside the family. Kanjilal writes that tea was now “touted as a medium for women’s awakening,” advertised as a tool for modern homemakers who understood nutrition and domestic hygiene.

The print side has its own scholar. Shobna Nijhawan of York University studied the Board’s advertisements in a Hindi literary magazine, Sudha, in the decade before Independence. Her abstract states the starting point plainly: “the habit and custom of tea drinking was not common amongst the Indian population of the first half of the twentieth century.” The advertisements therefore concentrated, she writes, on creating a culture of “proper” tea preparation and “correct” consumption. The middle-class woman and her family sat at the centre of them, with aristocratic and working women and film actresses attached to the drink as well.

The Board also lobbied employers. It urged factory owners and office managers to give workers an afternoon tea break, on the argument that it would make the workforce more alert and productive, according to Kanjilal. Tea was pitched as a national drink too, one that brought together India’s religious, linguistic and caste groups.

Private firms copied the free sample. Brooke Bond, Lipton and the Calcutta blender A. Tosh & Sons all adopted free cups and low-priced single-use packets, and Brooke Bond carts toured Calcutta brewing tea for anyone willing to try it. Tosh, which Kanjilal says was founded in 1897 by Ashutosh Ghosh and his eldest son, sold on the swadeshi mood of the time, the “Be Indian, Buy Indian!” sentiment.

What Indians did with the free cup

Calcutta took to the drink. Bengalis began calling it “cha,” Kanjilal writes, and local vendors with stoves and kettles started selling tea in small glass tumblers on the platforms at Howrah and along the roadsides.

Most people in the city did not follow the placards. They boiled the leaves together with milk, sugar and spices such as pounded ginger or crushed green cardamom. The amount of milk, Kanjilal says, was “far more than the British could have ever imagined.” The method horrified the British, she writes, “because they had failed to teach the Indians how to make the beverage the ‘correct way’.”

The inventor of that method is unknown. Lutgendorf reports that he could not trace a single creator of roadside chai, and credits the “unknown Chaiwalla or Chaiwalli.” Kanjilal, too, calls it difficult to trace whether the method came from the roadside vendor, the railway platform seller or the overworked homemaker.

Tea was not unknown in India before all this. The Singpho people of Assam, whose chief told the Scottish trader Robert Bruce about the wild plant in the early 1820s, had a tea of their own. The Better India reports that they roast the leaves in a pan, sun-dry them and pack them into bamboo tubes, and that the tradition may go back centuries. What the campaign of the 1930s built was a national habit, and the figures from the Tea Board show how far it went.

The Board’s own estimates put domestic consumption at 73 million kilograms in 1951, 140 million in 1961, 221 million in 1971 and 360 million in 1981. Per head, the table shows 202 grams in 1951 and 527 grams in 1981. In the 1960s and 1970s, according to Tea Journey’s summary of Lutgendorf, the CTC machine (crush, tear, curl) made tea cheaper and more plentiful, which let roadside vendors sell chai at a price their customers could pay.

Every pot of that chai carried sugar and milk. The sugar is a health question of its own, and the numbers are in our piece on India’s diet and diabetes.

Grain out, hunger in

Tea was one export among many. The Rachel Carson Center’s Environment & Society Portal, in its exhibition on Indian famines, lists the exports of the early nineteenth century as indigo, opium, cotton and silk. Raw jute, food grains, oilseeds and tea gradually took over from indigo and opium. The portal puts the rise in the value of India’s exports at more than 500 percent between 1859-60 and 1906-07, and says the greater share of the profit went to British business families, big farmers, some Indian traders and moneylenders.

Land revenue, the government’s tax on farmland, belongs to the wider story of how Britain drained India. In 1876 to 1877, just before one of the century’s worst famines, exports “continued to grow to meet Land Revenue demand,” the portal says. In 1897 to 1898, “17 million sterling of land revenue was collected; cultivators raised the money largely by selling food grains for export.”

The Famine Commission of 1880 made the first attempt to measure the country’s food supply against its needs. By those measures, the portal reports, British India around 1880 “produced a surplus of 5 million tons of food grains that were available for storage, export, or luxury consumption.” The Commission of 1898 repeated the exercise and concluded that “the surplus produce of India, taken as a whole, still furnishes ample means of meeting the demands of any of the country likely to suffer from famine at any one time.”

The portal is careful about what the figures show. Exports, it says, did not wipe out the surplus in normal years. They did continue through severe famines, and the shortage in those years was largely a created one: people without money could not buy grain that existed. The portal describes one formulation of the point. Famine, in that view, is the condition of some people not having enough food to eat, which differs from there not being enough food.

The death tolls of the 1876 to 1878 famine, covered in the Lytton article, start above five million in the lower estimates. The demographer Arup Maharatna’s 1996 estimate is 8.2 million. Bengal starved again in 1943, under the same administration, and estimates of that toll vary widely by who counts.

The groundnut mill that was never built

South-east India, the old Madras Presidency, shows the pattern in a single crop. The historian David Washbrook writes that groundnut was “virtually unknown before 1850 but came to be exported in huge quantities by the time of the First World War.” Southern farmers, he adds, had always been open to new crops. They took the potato, tobacco, chilli and tomato from the Americas “as if they were its own.” The story of how the chilli arrived is in Europe’s spice hunt and the discovery of America.

Washbrook also records what did not happen. From the late nineteenth century there were proposals to start an industry that would press groundnut oil in India rather than ship the kernels out. The European exporting companies objected, he writes, that any rise in domestic demand would push up the price of the crop and cut their profits. The government refused to take part, and it denied a private consortium access to government land, without which its plant could not be built.

Rice mills and the beriberi scare

The historian David Arnold counted the rice mills. In 1912 Madras had 68 registered rice mills, according to his Medical History article of 2010. By 1938 it had 342, and Bengal had 411. Rice milling employed 72,000 workers by the late 1930s.

Beriberi is a disease of too little thiamine, or vitamin B1, and doctors elsewhere in Asia had tied it to machine-polished white rice. Arnold’s account for India is more complicated. The number of mills in Madras, Bengal and Burma had grown rapidly since 1910 without any matching upsurge in beriberi, he writes, and the disease averaged 257 deaths a year in British India between 1924 and 1933. Outside Burma it was concentrated, as it had been before mechanised milling began, in the Northern Circars, a coastal strip of the Madras Presidency.

The reason lay in how Indians prepared rice. Among most castes and communities in Madras and Bengal, Arnold writes, rice was eaten only after parboiling, meaning it was soaked and steamed before milling. Later research showed that parboiling retained enough thiamine to prevent the disease. The Northern Circars were the exception, a place where, as the physician Robert McCarrison suggested in 1924, “uncured” rice was eaten for most of the year by poor people with little access to nourishing food.

McCarrison’s laboratory at Coonoor in the Nilgiris, which he ran from 1914 until 1935, was first called the beriberi inquiry. It widened into a study of nutrition in general. McCarrison told the Royal Commission on Agriculture in 1926 that of all the disabilities of the Indian masses, “malnutrition is perhaps the chief.”

The Government of Madras gave its advice in 1923: the best way to avoid beriberi was to use a varied diet and “not to restrict the diet too rigidly to machine-milled rice.” Arnold notes that not until the Second World War did India’s governments restrict rice milling, and then for reasons of wartime shortage rather than public health.

Sugar came later than people think

The Sugar Industry Protection Act, passed by the Indian Legislature in 1932, took the number of sugar mills from 32 in 1931-32 to 130 by 1934-35, according to the FAO, yet in 1960 white sugar was still only 25 percent of all sweeteners eaten, against 42 percent in 1980, which is the story told in India gave the world sugar. The shift to white sugar came mostly after independence.

Ghee from a factory

Ghee, or clarified butter, was the cooking fat the new product set out to imitate. In the 1930s, according to The Strategy Story, Dutch traders began bringing in hydrogenated vegetable oil as a substitute. Vanaspati is vegetable oil that has been partly hydrogenated, a process that hardens it so that it looks and cooks like ghee.

Hindustan Vanaspati Manufacturing Company was set up in 1931 as Unilever’s first Indian subsidiary, and Hindustan Unilever’s chronology has it making vanaspati at Sewri, in what is now Mumbai, from 1932. The brand name Dalda arrived in 1937. MAP Bengaluru, a museum project on Indian food, says England’s Lever Brothers and a Dutch company launched it that year. The Strategy Story gives the name’s origin as Dada, the importer’s trade name, joined to the L of Lever.

The selling problem, The Strategy Story says, was persuading Indians that a product that tasted like ghee, and fried like ghee, could cost less. It dates the first multi-media advertising campaign in India to 1939, run by Lintas, Lever’s agency, with a short film for theatres, vans shaped like round tins for the villages, print advertisements, leaflets and street stalls where people could taste samples.

In 2009 the Centre for Science and Environment tested 30 brands of cooking oils and found trans fats in all vanaspati brands at 5 to 12 times the Danish standard of 2 percent of total fat. India’s food regulator, the FSSAI, set a limit of 10 percent in 2013, announced a cut to 5 percent in September 2015 to be enforced by August 2016, and notified a limit of 2 percent on 2 February 2021, applying from January 2022.