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KHUJ KHUJTE ALI PUCH PUCHTE
KON DIKE AHIRABE GHOR HO,
PUCH PUCTE ALI KHUJ KHUJTE ALI
AHIRABE GHOR KOTI DUR HO .......
(Oh,
the cow race! After asking many people about you we have come here.)
Assam,
a lush green state of india is a land of red
perfect ground for Tea plantations. Apart from the Brahamaputra valley, Barak
valley and southern Assam also has abundance of tea plantations. Together river and blue hills. The wilds
of Assam merges with the lush green tea gardens on either side of the Brahamaputra
valley. The rich Alluvial soil fed by 200-300 cms of rain annually provides
Assam produces almost 400 million kg tea per annum.
| By the end of the nineteenth century most of the Assam tea- plantations had been opened and consolidated and Assam transformed into one vast agricultural estate to cater to the tea starved "home" market. But the process of erecting the biggest industry in colonial history was not without a price. Hundreds of Europeans, unused to the climate of this inhospitable land, perished in the endeavour to build up their own jade gardens. Thousands of workers, recruited from different and far off regions of India and transported to Assam to undertake soul-sapping labour in tea-plantations, went under the Mati (soil). |
 Tea Worker |
The Singphos and the Khamtis were the earliest ethnic communities in the then Assam to make tea drinking a habit. V4hether they had the brew of Miang or the vaid tea tree or had actually planted tea is not definitely known. But that they were used to the brew is an historical, fact. An Assamese medical treatise, Nidana, written in Sanskrit in the tenth centuryA.D., refers to tea as Shamapatra and the brew as Shamapani, Shama could well be the origin of Sah as tea is known in Assam or Cha or Chah as it is known elsewhere. The Enghsh word tea may come from the Chinese original te (pronounced 'tay'). Chinese and Japanese legends also trace the history of tea to India.
Each tea-garden in Assam has its own history- often one of sweat and toil and gore and death. A majority of the plantations were begun and built up through British ingenuity and enterprise. Three individuals-Maniram Dutta Barua, an Assamese noblemen and two intrepid British adventurers, Robert Bruce and his brother Charles Alexander Bruce- were instrumental in enlightening the British administration in the early part of nineteenth century about wild tea bushes growing in Assam, and thereby pointing the way to a possible alternative source of the cups which 11 cheer but not inebriate". The first tea company in the world, The Assam Company, spent almost two decades before effectively demonstrating that tea-grovang in Assam was a commer- cially viable prospect. Its success induced in the 1860s hordes of European speculators to make a bee line for Assam, buy or lease vast tracts of virgin land, and hack out tea-plantations from dense jungles.
