The Fourth Plate

By Gautam Kumar Saikia

For centuries, the hills of Assam nurtured one of humanity’s most remarkable plants: Tea. The indigenous people of this region didn’t need to “discover” tea: they lived with it, understood it and developed methods for its use. This is not a story that begins with European arrival, but one that was violently interrupted by it.

The roots of this interruption trace back to Europe’s growing tea obsession. The Portuguese first established tea trade with China, before Dutch merchants wrested control in the early 17th century, making the Netherlands Europe’s first tea-drinking nation. Britain’s romance with tea began after Charles II’s marriage to Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, quickly spreading throughout British society.

By 1689, the East India Company had seized the Chinese tea trade from the Dutch. However, this created a serious economic problem: China demanded silver for tea, draining British reserves. 

The Company’s solution was morally questionable: they began trading opium grown in Bengal to China, effectively turning the country into a nation of opium addicts. This led to confrontations with Chinese authorities and eventually the Opium Wars. With their Chinese trade treaty expiring in 1833, the British desperately needed an alternative source of tea.

The truth is that long before the British East India Company cast its acquisitive gaze toward Assam, the region was part of an ancient Asian civilization linked by the Tea-Horse Road (Cha Ma Dao). 

This vast network of trade routes connected tea-producing regions across Assam, Burma, and Yunnan with Tibet, creating a commercial and cultural exchange that had flourished for over a millennium. The trade represented a complex web of botanical knowledge, cultural practices and sustainable resource management that had evolved over centuries.

The Singpho people exemplified this deep relationship with tea. Their traditional phalap was as much a beverage as a cultural practice, requiring precise knowledge of harvesting, roasting, drying and aging tea in bamboo tubes. 

This wasn’t “wild” – as the East India Company built its narrative twist. It was agriculture, with firm fundamentals, adapted perfectly to the local ecosystem. The Singpho understanding of tea also extended beyond simple cultivation; they used it as food, medicine and a central element of their cultural practices.

Other indigenous communities also maintained their own relationships with tea, each developing distinct methods of processing and consumption. This diversity of practice demonstrates the richness and established norms that existed around tea cultivation long before European intervention – which history and its footnotes have pushed under the carpet, making the world believe in the ‘East India Company’ narrative of the British ‘discovering’ tea in India – much like the juvenile notion of Christopher Columbus ‘discovering’ America. 

When the British arrived in the early 19th century, what they really did is seize the knowledge that existed and made it into their own. In fact, even their supposed “discovery” in 1823 came only through the guidance of Maniram Dutta Barua, who led them to Singpho chief Bessa Gam. The East India Company’s contribution, if you look at it, was sheer theft, transforming an indigenous heritage into a colonial commodity.

The British East India Company’s motivation was of course starkly economic. Facing a crisis over their dependence on Chinese tea and the drain on silver reserves it caused, they seized upon Assam’s indigenous tea as their solution. 

The transformation that followed was brutal and systematic. Through “Wasteland Settlement Rules,” they stripped local communities of their ancestral lands. They dismissed the centuries of indigenous land management practices as ‘primitive’ and declared the vast tracts of occupied territory as “waste” ready for European exploitation.

The colonial machine then imported thousands of indentured laborers from central India, creating a captive workforce to serve their plantations.

These workers faced deadly conditions during their transport to Assam, with many perishing from disease in overcrowded river steamers. Those who survived found themselves trapped in a system of perpetual bondage, housed in unsanitary “coolie lines” and subjected to brutal working conditions.

Maniram Dutta Barua’s fate reveals the true nature of this colonial enterprise. When he attempted to establish his own tea gardens in the 1840s, European planters saw him as a threat. But Barua’s story too was twisted and hidden under the imposed narrative. 

To give credit, what the British brought to tea cultivation to Assam was ‘plantation agriculture’ but it was also an exploitative system designed to extract maximum profit through minimum investment in human welfare. But to promote their ‘plantation’ approach, they cleared and destroyed vast areas of primary forests, now contributing to climate change. 

Their scientific dismissal of Assam tea as a “wild camellia” followed by its rapid elevation to an imperial asset once its commercial value was proven reveals the cynical nature of colonial “science.”

Even the Ahom kingdom, which had ruled Assam for six centuries, maintained an understanding of local flora, as evidenced by their complex ethnobotanical knowledge used in producing traditional beverages like Xaj. Their state chronicles, the Buranjis, while focused on matters of statecraft, reflect a society deeply attuned to its natural resources and their management.

In fact, there were three Burmese invasions in Assam in 1817, 1819 and 1821. Years later, the ‘Treaty of Yandabu’ was signed by the British and the Burmese on February 24, 1826, which made Assam a part of British Colony. At that time, Assam was full of jungles and forest trees and situated at the remotest part of the country with communication problem. The real question then is: Did the East India Company sign the treaty to rescue Ahom Kingdom from the Burmese or for claiming their share of tea. 

Today, as we reexamine colonial histories worldwide, it’s time to set the record straight about Assam tea. This isn’t a story of British discovery as we have been made to believe, but one of indigenous knowledge and colonial appropriation. 

Acknowledging this means understanding how colonial structures continue to shape our present. Only by understanding this history can we begin to address its lasting impacts and work toward a more equitable future for all those involved in tea production.

Put in the right context: A true history of Assam tea must move beyond the colonial lens. It must begin not in 1823, but centuries earlier, in the forests and villages of the region. 

It requires a historiography that privileges indigenous sources that include oral traditions, material culture, and the botanical record. 

It also calls to challenge colonial archives that go against the truth and silence the histories of those people who knew, used and revered the tea plant long before it attracted the ambitions of the ‘empire’. 

The legacy of tea in Assam is that of an indigenous heritage that was systematically overwritten but never entirely erased.

(The story is part of a forthcoming book to be published by Prof. Gautam Kumar Saikia, Department of Tea Husbandry & Technology, Assam Agricultural University, Jorhat 785013, Assam)

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