Tea Reconsidered

A Hindu temple in Chatlapore tea garden.

I’m invited to the home of Mintu Deshwara, the Daily Star correspondent for Moulvibazar. He’s the proud son of tea labourers.

It’s not every day the chance arises to stay in a tea worker’s cottage; but with the afternoon heat and the walking, when we arrive I’m tired. I wonder where on Earth I am.

The realities of Moulvibazar’s Chatlapore Tea Estate are complex. There’s a gruesome history. There’s a multicultural community all too ready to smile. People want a better future in spite of the pressures of the international tea trade. I don’t know what to think.

It’s usual for it to take time. The brain has to process, to meld some sort of sense into new experience. Precisely what part of the result arises from the raw and what part is constructed as memories arranged through the brain’s filter of personal values, life experience and culture I couldn’t say. But there’s no such thing as objectivity.

The village has a sweet, pungent smell. Is it incense or a range of native cooking styles from various Indian places? It doesn’t smell like regular Bangladesh. The faces that stop to ask who I am – they aren’t Bengali faces.

The welcoming introductions are easy enough but when that is done I give in. For a couple of hours I sleep.

Meanwhile, word travels. Eight women from nearby houses want to see what the foreigner looks like. They don’t just arrive: they’ve spent time dressing up in best saris, with bangles and make-up.

Mintu offers to wake me. They don’t let him. So they wait for one and a half hours...

The tea garden ladies waited for one and a half hours...

As I take in their excited faces gathered along the edge of the bed and in the hastily arranged chairs I feel overwhelmingly honoured. It’s that blessing that only a traveller knows – quite a welcome!

But I feel other things. There’s minor guilt at having kept them waiting. There’s some uneasiness. I know enough of the history. I’m not British but most Australians are at least in part descended from those same colonisers. You can’t get away from that.

Those ladies’ ancestors were shuffled about, lured by lies in order to build a tea industry. It’s hardly history – they still live in poverty. Part of me wants to be invisible so as not to be in any way a Sahib.

Better to focus on their welcoming friendliness...

We chat away in Bengali, mother tongue to none of us. They aren’t shy. We drink tea.

In the evening with Mintu I set off through the village. It leads to the courtyard of the Bauris’ home. They speak Bauria language.

Hari Kamal Bauri, 70, with his wife Ahila Bauri, 60.

Retired worker Hari Kamal Bauri, 70, heard his maternal grandparents came from one Bakuria District. “We have no connection with that place,” he says, “Maybe it’s near Dhaka?”

Bakuria is a place name in Jharkhand state of India but it’s likely his ancestors came from Bankura District of Paschimbanga which, along with Birbhum and other districts along that state’s western edge, is home to the Bauri people.

Basic research says Bauris revere their tribal emblem the red-backed heron and hold dogs to be sacred. They eat beef, pork, fowls, fish and rats, but not snakes or lizards – and they like a drink. It’s unlikely the Bauris of the tea garden know much of this.

His wife Ahila Bauri, 60, says her paternal grandparents never said where they came from but her parents said they came from Sreemangal.

How much do we lose of ourselves if we don’t know our true origins?

The Bauris at home.

“On the first day my mother gave birth to me,” Ahila Bauri says, describing her life. “Later they married me off and sent me to my husband’s house. He sent me to the garden for work.”

Before their wedding day they’d never met. I ask how she felt. She says, “What did I think? Everybody was sitting there! What could I think?”

With many days behind them, they seem relaxed and content. Five children later – and they couldn’t quite manage to send them through school – they have an allocated cottage to live in and a family to enjoy as they age. They seem quite fond of each other.

“Smith Sahib used to drive a car and give salaams,” he says of the British management.

“Memsahib was beautiful,” she says, “She gave the children biscuits.”

I’m considering the cottage behind them. While there can be no doubt the British entertained their own interests, a brick cottage is far from nothing. I remember rural Bangladesh even most of twenty years ago. It wasn’t just anybody who had a brick house then.

When the Bauris’ ancestors were first deposited in the garden, after the jungles were cleared, it likely would’ve been a more materialistically comfortable life than the way locals lived. It was long before the mansions of Londoni ex-pats rose in the quiet streets around Kulaura. Things have changed, except in the garden.

By another villager I’m shown a slip of paper: it’s a Charge Sheet from management. The charge is stealing a shade tree. The charged worker is required to provide an explanation – in writing or, if they are illiterate, verbally, why they should not be dismissed or otherwise punished. They may cross-examine witnesses.

There are no police in the gardens. Where is the court? It’s as though the laws of Bangladesh don’t properly apply there. Those are anachronistic privatised communities run by the tea companies.

A nurse walking home from the dispensary.

I’m told that in September 2012 the Tea Worker’s Union negotiated a wage increase, settled by the government’s Wage Commission, from 48 to 69 taka per day – for an A-grade garden. In addition workers receive housing, promises of health care and education.

At the same time workers needed to increase productivity. Before, they’d needed to collect 16 kilograms of tea leaves per day to avail full salary. It was raised to 23 kilograms – in other words, they would still be paid 3 taka per kilogram – a pro rata increase of zero.

The last elections for the Tea Worker’s Union were in August this year. With bargaining soon to commence for a new salary agreement to last the next two years, the Union’s hoping for a new salary of 200 taka per day.

Rehearsals for Durga Puja in the tea garden.

I wonder why we often hear ambassadors from the United States and Europe making public comment on the rights of garments workers but not tea workers. Western countries don’t, in general, produce tea – western companies do, in developing countries. Unlike with the garment sector where the west still has some local production and jobs to protect – and besides, dramatic events like the Rana Plaza collapse embarrass western consumers – perhaps for the tea industry profit margins are all that matter?

It’s not that there aren’t alternatives to champion. New ownership and production systems have been introduced in parts of Sri Lanka, India and also in Panchagarh, to better compensate labourers.

The colonialism cycle can be broken. It’s time to reconsider tea – because the Bauris may live quietly in an old allocated brick cottage, but at what human price? Okay, so, maybe I do know what to think...

Tea workers busy with gardening.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Tea Reconsidered

Me with the tea ladies.

In the Garden

Chatlapore Tea Garden in Moulvibazar District.

Sun and light: the dirt road leading into Moulvibazar District’s Chatlapore hillock country feels forgotten. At the final village bazaar the rickshaw pulls to a stop. It’ll be on foot from there. There’s a sentry post and a boundary. It’s in the nature of gardens to be distinct from the wider world. They’re supposed to be nature rationalised and improved.

Houses are different in the garden.

The houses of usual Bangladesh can venture no further in, because usual Bangladesh has ended. Ahead are old structures of a new kind: workers’ cottages in rendered brick, washed in white, pastel blue or green, with brick chimneys distantly reminiscent of an old English village and more directly of colonial India. Only the tin roofs are the same.

An old landscape of a new kind arrives too: neatly trimmed tea bushes cover most ground, recounting at some feet higher the undulating lay of the land, in parallel. “When I was young the tea trees were younger,” says Sagar Das 50, a native of the estate who with his wife was long ago allocated one of those cottages. “Now I am old and the tea trees are also older.”

The small hills of Chatlapore.

Since the dawn of time gardens have been planted, pruned and tended as a space for relaxation, of beauty and contemplation. Gardens are usually a place to escape ourselves – but for its inhabitants the tea garden defines. Instead of being away from daily life the tea garden is daily life. It’s the only life. In place of a border to block out a shabbier world the tea garden boundary hems a world in. Das was born in Chatlapore.

When he was a baby his mother used to take him to sleep in a basket in the narrow aisles between the tea bushes or at the roadside under a tree. Jackals occasionally took children then. But a baby could hardly be left at home while wife plucked and husband toiled in the garden.

In Chatlapore tea garden, Moulvibazar.

As a boy there were games – one with two sticks, a longer one as bat and the shorter as ball. They played jambura football too, kicking the large grapefruit – called a pomelo or shaddock in English, about any patch of open ground. “As kids we ran naked,” says Das. “We didn’t know much.”

At 12 years old his unadulterated childhood reached its conclusion. With only one year of schooling completed, Das started to work. His first job was cleaning the nursery where tea saplings are readied. After one month he was shifted to drain digging. His starting salary was 37 taka per week, which he gave to his parents.

Tea garden housing for the workers.

On his first day he expressed shock. “What has my father done?” he asked aloud, “Will I come into the jungle to work?” The other workers laughed. Like theirs, his life in the garden was predetermined. He belonged to it.

Of course he’d learn the morning conversations: “Ma gave me rice,” “Ma gave me flat bread.” Minute details shared, even if tongue-in-cheek, was about all there was for variety and diversion – on the way to work, during the 9 am to 2 pm workday – every day except Sunday, or after work over a cup of preferred salt tea. Sugar is expensive in the garden.

These days Das works with a sickle, pruning. As is usual for a worker his current salary is a paltry 69 taka per day. He participates in leaf plucking during monsoon when the volume can’t be met by the women alone.

Rajkumari Das never went to school. She started working when she was 12.

Rajkumari Das, 40.

His wife Rajkumari Das, 40, is originally from Khajadura Tea Estate. She also started working at age twelve. “The tea garden was exciting,” she says of those first days, with an initial month devoted to fertilizer before she began helping her mother to pluck. “But I am still plucking!” she says.

Like the men, during work hours with two to three hundred other women she got used to sharing life’s little details. They talk about their families and homes, food and children. They swap recipes for chutney or favoured dishes, and occasionally chase away foxes.

Sometimes discussions are lively, sometimes serious or sad. And it all happens in that chutney language they call Chilo-Milo – a mixture of languages from all the groups the British seduced and brought from across India to work the plantations. For the word ‘come’, some say asa while others say awa, awather, awatho, awohi or chelo... there are yet more ways than those...

In the garden they speak a blended language called Chilo-Milo.

In the garden is a new culture and language of an old kind – or rather a mixture of many.

The language Mr and Mrs Das speak at home they call Deshwari, which may refer to the name of a village populated by Hindi and Santal speakers in India’s Jharkhand state. Their Deshwari may be a localised version of Hindi – it’s uncertain. Like many thereabouts they know little of their ancestry. Useless things from beyond the garden boundary, anything that doesn’t help the plants grow like identity, would seem to have a propensity to dissolve in salt tea – and in the garden sugar is expensive.

The first tea workers were brought in from across India.

Rajkumari, who never went to school, heard from her parents that her great grandfather came from some Indian elsewhere. Like many neighbours she’s heard that those first workers were coaxed into the garden with promises of finding trees that produced money just by touching or shaking them. More than that, she doesn’t know.

Over a century has gone since their forefathers arrived and a quiet sense of resignation appears to have settled over the Das home. They have their modest housing and at least the promise of adequate health care. There’s little point in questioning their below-meagre salaries which shape that quality blend of employment and servitude that is also their lives.

Tea workers taking a break from weeding, extra work undertaken before the plucking season peak.

There’s only to accept the multi-generational dislocation from original culture and ancestral identity. The British wanted tea. The garden came to be. In their family, all hope of genuine change belongs wholly to the next generation.

Identity tends to dissolve in the salt tea of the garden.

The house allocated to Mr and Mrs Das is, by coincidence, opposite one of the garden’s primary schools. “I used to see other children going in there,” says the father of four, “so I sent mine.”

Besides, Sagar Das remembers his own bewilderment at being sent to work in the ‘jungle’. He remembers his words about his father on his first work day. “My children,” he says with quiet pride, “will never say such a thing about me!”

Sagar Das aims for a future for his children beyond the garden.

Nowadays their eldest daughter works as a teacher for BRAC; the other two daughters and one son study from college to class 8. “I want my children to have a good life; I hope they will be able to take care of themselves,” says Das. “Only Bhagawan knows how it will happen exactly – but as long as they are okay. What more could I wish for?”

He seems to be aiming for his children to live beyond the boundary. Through education his goal appears to be nature rationalised and improved. For his children, Sagar Das wants the radical reality of a genuine garden – and perhaps even tea with sugar.

Allocated workers' housing.

But there’s a problem: the plantation system is designed for replication, not for change. It doesn’t have much time for the whims of one Mr. Das. Tea garden workers can only stay in their homes as long as at least one family member works in the plantation. So if all his children establish themselves beyond the hem and the rules of the only life he and his wife have known, where will they stay when they get old?

The British wanted tea. The gardens came to be. Evening arrives at Chatlapore.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: In The Garden

The tea garden hems life in.