03 Mar Who Grew My Brew
The story of how Kolkata became a center for the tea trade
Tea is the world’s favorite drink, and Kolkata can proudly claim to play a big part in the global tea market.
How the city became a hub for one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world is a story filled with the most remarkable characters.
By the 1800s tea had become the East India Company’s most valuable traded commodity. But the British had a problem; they were entirely dependent on China for the tea and desperately needed another source. In Assam, two Scottish brothers, Robert and Charles Bruce (both are buried in a Tezpur church), became the first Britishers to discover that tea plants grew wild locally and were consumed by the Singpho tribe. Some Indian tea was exported to England and the Assam Company – the first joint stock Tea Company – was formed. But unfortunately, Indian tea was seen as inferior to the Chinese variety and never really took off.
The burial plaque of Charles Bruce (1793-1871) at Tezpur in Assam; his reports on Assam tea led to the founding of the commercial tea industry in AssamLord Bentinck, who was then the Governor General, formed a Tea Committee to figure the way forward. The committee decided it was best to smuggle tea saplings from China into India, along with the knowhow of how to process the tea leaves. A Scottish botanist Robert Fortune was hired for this corporate espionage; an apt name for a person who was about to steal an entire industry.
Fortune arrived in China in 1848. He shaved his head, adopted the name Sing Wa, disguised himself as a Chinese government official, and travelled for three years across the country’s tea-producing provinces, making detailed notes. When Fortune sailed back to India, he carried a huge quantity of plants and seeds and six Chinese tea masters, in an act that today would be termed an epic corporate fraud.
The Scottish botanist Robert Fortune spent three years in China disguised as a local, ferreting out its tea secrets (picture source: Wikipedia)
Ironically, despite this daredevil tea heist, the Chinese plants Fortune brought to India proved unsuitable for Assam. It was left to some breakthrough research at Calcutta Botanical Gardens – led by its Danish-origin head Nathaniel Wallich – to rescue the Indian tea story. Wallich identified that both the Assam and China tea plants were of the same Camellia sinensis species, and with this the focus shifted to using the local tea bush for expanding Indian tea cultivation.
Meanwhile, another character joined this list of remarkable personalities. Robert Thomas landed in Kolkata in 1833, as a young Welshman seeking his fortune. He saw an opportunity for setting up an auction house trading in commodities – indigo, silk, cotton, tea – and founded J. Thomas and Company, the first company to conduct an auction of Indian tea in Kolkata.
The wonderfully moustached Robert Thomas was the founder of Kolkata’s tea auction system, which continues to this dayIt was Robert Thomas’s auction system that anchored the tea trade to Kolkata, placing this city at the center of the tea map. The auctions helped tea growers from remote areas access wider markets, brought buyers and sellers together on the same platform, and provided the transparency of demand and supply for discovering a fair price. To this day, weekly tea auctions are held in Kolkata, and the longevity of the tea auctions has proven their effectiveness. J. Thomas and Company remains a venerable Kolkata institution, the oldest and largest tea auctioneer in the world.
One of the earliest Tea Auction catalogues from 1873; the auction to start “at 2.30pm precisely”Among the list of amazing personalities that made Kolkata a center for the tea trade, only Robert Thomas is buried in the city. So I decided to search out his grave and see for myself this slice of tea heritage that few knew about. On a hot and clammy April afternoon I arrived at the Lower Circular Road cemetery, carrying with me an old photograph of Thomas’ grave that I had found from past research. I met Margaret Ekka, the Secretary of the Christian Burial Board, at her small office near the entrance to the cemetery and she kindly agreed to help me. We sat together under a whirling ceiling fan while my photograph was passed around among the workers, and one of the maalis recognized the burial place, guessing from the location of the trees in the background. We entered the cemetery and searched among thousands of silent graves, under the shadow of huge mango and jamun trees with bunches of fruit waiting to be plucked, our feet crunching on the dried leaves and twigs strewn on the ground. Finally, we found the burial place of Robert Thomas (1808-65), “the father of the tea trade and auction system in India”.
I stood beside Thomas’s grave in the still and humid air, with just the cawing of birds and the scampering of squirrels for company. The grave was beginning to fall apart, and its headstone was faded with age. As I looked at this silent reminder of the city’s tea story, I wished I could have enjoyed a cuppa with Robert Thomas and heard his many tales. Hurrah for the cup that cheers.
Robert Thomas, founder of the first Company to conduct a tea auction in Kolkata, is buried in the Lower Circular Road cemetery. A silent reminder of the city’s tea story.