How Tea Came to India’s Regions: From the Singpho to the First Gardens and Tocklai

Camellia sinensis is native to India as well as China. Local people used the leaves as food and medicine, cooked with vegetables or made into soup, long before tea became the sweet, milky chai most Indians drink today.

The Singphos plucked tender leaves, dried them in the sun, left them out in the night dew for three days, then packed them into hollow bamboo tubes and smoked them until the flavor developed.

Our team spent three days with the Singpho community at Margherita in 2016. Rajesh Singpho, the community’s unofficial leader, told us with quiet pride that the Singpho were the first Indians to find and drink tea as we know it today.

Their bamboo-smoked coin tea looked like any other black tea in the cup, but the first sip was “green, smoky and like nothing I’d ever tasted before,” our writer Richa Gupta reported. When we visited, the village ran one processing facility that the whole community owned. Read the full story: Assam Diaries: Margherita, the Singphos and Coin Tea.

In 1823 a Scottish trader, Robert Bruce, was introduced to the Singpho by an Assamese nobleman, Maniram Dewan, and was shown the tea they drank. After Robert’s death, his brother Charles sent samples to Calcutta, where the plant was confirmed as tea, a variety different from China’s, later named assamica.

History has long credited Bruce with the “discovery,” but the Singphos had been drinking tea since antiquity, and it was Maniram Dewan who opened the door.

From a committee to 160 gardens

The East India Company moved carefully. In 1834 it set up a Tea Committee of experts to judge the commercial potential of Assam tea, and by the late 1830s Assam tea was being tested on the London market. The first Indian tea was sold in London in 1839.

That same year the Assam Tea Company was formed to grow and make the new tea. The industry expanded steadily, and by 1862 Assam had over 160 gardens, owned by 5 public companies and 57 private players.

Maniram Dewan, the “father of Assam tea”

Maniram Dewan’s own story is one of the great untold ones in tea. By 1839 he was Dewan of the newly formed Assam Tea Company. He later left, set up his own garden near Jorhat and became the first Indian to grow tea commercially in Assam.

He fell out with the British, was found guilty of plotting an uprising during the 1857 revolt, and was hanged at Jorhat jail on 26 February 1858. He is remembered as the “father of Assam tea.”

The East India Company smuggled Chinese seed into its colonies, but in the hot Assam plains the China plant did poorly, so planters turned to the local assamica. The first British-led commercial plantation in India was set up at Chabua in Upper Assam in the late 1830s. The China plant, known in India as Chinary, found its home higher up, in Darjeeling and Kangra. The difference between the two plants, and the clonal bushes bred from them, is explained in Chinary, Assam and clonal tea plants.

Chabua, or Chubwa

The name comes from chah bowa, Assamese for “tea planting,” and the garden is probably the first tea plantation in Upper Assam. When we visited for the summer flush in 2015 it was as famous for its hospital, run by its parent company, as for its tea.

The first attempt failed. Tea planted in 1835 where the Dibru river meets the Brahmaputra perished, and the saplings planted at Chubwa in 1836 were the first to grow. The estate’s surviving records begin in 1898, and during the Second World War its bungalow was used as a resting place for soldiers.

Darjeeling’s first gardens

Dr. Campbell, Darjeeling’s first Superintendent, planted China seed from the Company’s nurseries in his own garden in 1841, when about 25 families lived in the area. As land was handed out for tea, each lot had to keep 60% as forest, with only 40% cleared for planting.

The first planter was Captain Samler, at Alubari in 1856, for the Kurseong and Darjeeling Tea Company; Dr. Brougham planted Harsing and Dooteriah in 1859. To find workers, Campbell turned to a Nepali nobleman, Dakman Rai, who brought in thousands of Gorkhas and other Nepalis and was paid partly in seed. With it he set up his own gardens: Soureni in 1878, Phuguri in 1880 and Sampripani in 1883.

A timeline of tea in India

The railway was built for tea. In the 19th century the journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling took five to six days by bullock cart and pony; the line opened from Siliguri to Kurseong in August 1880 and reached Darjeeling Bazaar in July 1881.

In 1891 a joint committee of the Indian Tea Association and the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Bengal appointed a chemist, M. Kelway Bamber, to study how tea grew in India. The Tocklai Experimental Station followed in 1911.

Science followed the gardens. Tocklai, in Jorhat, is described by its scientists as Asia’s oldest and largest tea research institute, and when we visited in 2016 it was advising over 1,076 estates across India, the figure given to us by senior scientist Dr. M. Goswami. The mother plant of India’s first clone, an Assam-China hybrid developed in 1949 from seed collected at Maniram Dewan’s Cinnamara estate, still grows there. Read our tour of the Tocklai Tea Research Institute.

The industry did not end when the British left in 1947. Most gardens passed to Indian owners, and India remains one of the world’s largest tea producers, second only to China.

Darjeeling shows the scale of what changed hands. By 1900 it had 148 gardens covering some 18,475 hectares, and by 1947 it was making 14 million kg of tea a year. At independence the British owners sold to Indian entrepreneurs and went home, though a few, such as C.W. Emmett and T.J. Hardingham, stayed on. Some gardens later closed through mismanagement, and today 87 remain.

Tea is the second-largest employer in India, as we noted in 2022, and a single estate runs on more than 24 connected roles, from the garden’s general manager to the tea boy.

For the wider story, from China to the world, see The history of tea.

Who were the Kalimpong KidsSteeping Indian Tea History · 3:26