the development of the tea industry in india and pakistan

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEA INDUSTRY IN INDIA AND PAKISTANAuthor(s): Arnold WhittakerSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 97, No. 4800 (29th JULY, 1949), pp. 678-687Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41364433 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 15:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Society of Arts.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.0.146.7 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:15:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=thersa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41364433?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS 2ÇTH JULY 1 949

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEA INDUSTRY IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

By Arnold Whittaker, c.s.i., c.i.e.

India, Pakistan and Burma Section, Thursday, 7th April, 1949

C. K. Nicholl, Chairman , Indian Tea Association {London), in the Chair

The Chairman: It is an honour to preside this afternoon and have the privilege of introducing Mr. Arnold Whittaker, for there can be few who possess the same intimate knowledge not only of India and its peoples but also of tea.

I ought perhaps to explain to you how Mr. Whittaker came to be associated with the industry. Before the Government of India Act of 1935 became operative, the Indian tea industry realized that it was essential in its best interests to have the services of men to represent it not only at the centre of the Government but in the local provincial legislatures as well. It was further recognized that the best men for such appointments were most likely to be found among the members of the Indian Civil Service, who, from their intimate knowledge of Indian problems, as well as their administrative experience, were eminently suited for such duties. Mr. Arnold Whittaker was therefore offered and accepted a post as one of the advisers to the industry, and his services during his association with tea in India were outstanding.

I am happy to think that he is still with us as a member of the Committee of the Indian Tea Association in London. In addition he rendered more than valuable help to the Government of India and the Province of Assam in many other spheres during the Second World War.

I am quite sure, therefore, that there are not many better qualified to address you on the subject of tea and I will now call upon Mr. Whittaker to do so.

The following Paper was then read :

I hope that the short and simple film to be shown soon will be a better illustration than any lengthy remarks of mine of the opening-up of plantations and the manufacture of tea in India. The film is mainly concerned with Assam, which produces more than half the total crop of India and Pakistan . Assam was the first area to be developed, and was followed by planting in the Himalayan foothills in 1842, in the Surma valley in 1856, in Darjeeling during the next two years, and by 1874 in the Western Dooars. In South India commercial planting had begun in 1853, but development was slow and nearly two-thirds of the total acreage under tea was planted after 1900.

The industry, which has now an annual crop of almost 600 million pounds is a comparatively modern one. Its development is a tale of British enterprise and endurance, for it has survived economic adversity and lived through a political revolution - albeit a peaceful one. It has achieved a remarkable measure of autonomy in that much of the legislation which governs its production and exports, the recruitment of its labour forces and the marketing of its product was initiated by

678



2ÇTH JULY 1949 DEVELOPMENT OF TEA INDUSTRY IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

the industry itself. Its critics say that the Government was merely the agent for the industry ; its friends say that it provides a perfect example of the harmony which should exist between Government and industry generally. That this tradition is continuing with entirely new governments in power and in an entirely changed political climate suggests that practical men on both sides find that the method works.

A film entitled A Tale in a Teacup , kindly loaned by The Tea Bureau, London, was then shown. On its conclusion the lecturer continued :

The tea industry was established in China many centuries before the Christian era. By the ninth century A.D. there was an impressive volume of literature on the growth of the plant and the technique of tea drinking. Tea had all the medicinal and gastronomical virtues imaginable, but of special interest to me is the twentieth item on the list given in a Chinese manuscript now in the British Museum which runs: "It strengthens the use of due benevolence". As your lecturer I can only hope that the brew provided by the Royal Society of Arts distils this quality for its audiences.

The dominance of the China tea industry had two unfortunate effects on the development in India. First, the fact that the East India Company had the monopoly of the tea trade with China caused that company to discourage any tea venture in India. In 1 8 13, however, Parliament curtailed the company's powers in India and served notice that the China monopoly would end in 1833. In 1834 Lord William Bentinck, who had been appointed Governor-General in 1827, appointed a committee to submit "a plan for the accomplishment of the introduction of tea culture into India and for the superintendence of its execution". The very wording of that injunction shows the determination and far-sightedness of its author - accomplishment and execution strike the note. That committee set about its business so thoroughly that the facts it established launched the tea industry with surprisingly few misadventures. Secondly, although Lord Bentinck 's committee quickly found beyond all doubt that the tea bush is indigenous to Upper Assam, a scientific commission set up later became obsessed, as did many other members in the Government, with the merits of the China plant ; and when the Government of the day started to clear jungle in Dibrugarh they rejected

" the degraded Assam plant" for the China variety imported with great difficulty and at enormous expense. Another obsession that only the Chinese knew how to manufacture tea was more quickly abandoned when the first- and last - contingent of Chinese labourers specially imported ended their journey in jail for rioting, arson and theft.

As early as 1815 a British officer (Colonel Latter) had reported that certain of the hill tribes in North-East Assam made a drink from wild tea growing in the hills. In 1823 Major Robert Bruce took a trading expedition to Sibsagar and found wild tea, the seeds from which were collected by his brother, C. A. Bruce, in the following year and planted in the Commissioner's Garden at Gauhati and in Bruce 's own garden at Sadiya.

In 1825 this Society of Arts offered a gold medal - or fifty guineas - "to the person who shall grow and prepare 20 lb. of good quality tea".

Mr. C. A. Bruce was appointed the first Superintendent of Tea Culture in Assam in 1836. In 1838 the first shipment of manufactured Indian tea was ready. It consisted of eight chests, about 350 lb., which was sold in January, 1839, lñ

679



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS 2ÇTH JULY 1 949 the Mincing Lane auctions at prices ranging from 21s to 34$ a pound. In 1839 Upper Assam was brought under British control and the Government transferred its main tea-growing interests in the following year to the Assam Company which appointed C. A. Bruce its first Superintendent.

The company ran into difficulties for disease took a heavy toll of its managers and their labour forces. Clearing this heavy jungle was costly, although 2,500 acres were under cultivation by 1841 and 29,000 lb. of tea were produced. By 1847 company was on the verge of bankruptcy when a change of management and increased cultivation of the despised Assam variety pulled the company through to the dividend-earning stage by 1852. This successful example was followed by other companies; and by 1859 there were more than fifty private enterprises producing tea. The degraded Assam plant had come into its own. Today all the tea-producing countries outside China and Japan are seeking the Assam strains for their finest commercial teas.

From these beginnings grew the industry which is, outside China, the largest producer of tea in the world, employing ij million persons and housing over 3 million. I like to think that the shades of Major Bruce and his brother, who, with their teams of labourers used to hack their paths through the jungle in search of tea bushes, often in danger from the Burmese invaders who had dispossessed the local Ahoms, have seen in 1942 their successors building roads and bridges through the jungles of the Naga Hills to repel another invader from Burma - the Japanese. In 1942 the Indian Tea Association called for volunteers from its British managers, doctors, Indian staff and labour forces to build airfields from which supplies were to be flown to China, to build camps and roads along which were coming exhausted refugees fleeing from the Japanese in Burma, and to keep roads open through monsoon rains for transporting stores for an army which finally was to drive the Japanese from Burma. To answer this call there came the garden-labour contingents numbering at one time 96,000 men, each contingent fully equipped with its own transport and medical supplies and its own jungle clearing tools. Out of the "degraded Assam plant" came the resources which helped to fly supplies to China and to defeat the enemy of the homeland of tea - surely one of time's odd revenges.

The development of this industry would have been impossible without a continuing and on the whole successful fight against disease. In 1949, penicillin, the sulpha drugs and paludrine have become household words and their success a popular story. But to maintain a labour force of 1 ¿ million persons in the field - you will forgive this somewhat martial language - was an unremitting struggle for the doctors and the managers. The British planter now has a health record better than his contemporaries in England, but only fifty years ago a newspaper could describe the planter's diet as "quinine every morning, castor oil twice a week and calomel at the change of the moon". It is only eighteen years ago since the Whitley Com- mission reported that " The toll of life extracted in India every year by epidemic diseases is still very high and of them all malaria is perhaps the most devastating".

In 1928 Sir Malcolm Watson of the Ross Institute went out to India to examine the possibility of organising a scheme to assist the tea industry to control malaria. In 1930 the industry was facing its most serious financial crisis due to excess

680



2ÇTH JULY I949 DEVELOPMENT OF TEA INDUSTRY IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

production and a slump in consumption. Nevertheless, a number of British firms and individuals came forward to guarantee funds which led to the establishment of the Indian Branch of the Ross Institute, which now serves many other industries in India. A footnote to this story is that malaria has become a very minor cause of absenteeism - in my own company of less significance than influenza. And when the industry's divisions marched into the Naga Hills in 1942 they had a lower sickness rate than many of the picked combatant units. That struggle, of course, goes on and nutrition in these days of food shortages and disorganised supplies is the recurring problem. It remains true, however, that the average labourer in a tea

Collecting tea seed

garden is better fed, better housed and in better health than his opposite number

in the village; but clearly that standard of well-being is not a fixed one. The

imagination which could finance the Ross Institute in a time of financial crisis is still there and will take care of the post-war health problems.

Production The combined production of India and Pakistan is close on 600 million pounds.

Taking 200 cups of tea to the pound this gives you, according to your inclination, either astronomical figures or a Niagara. The industry on the whole takes the view that increased consumption is the main problem, although the loss of the production from the Netherlands East Indies (approximately 260 million pounds) means that

for the time being there is a firm market for all the Indian Continent produces. Various estimates are available about the present yield from the Netherlands

681



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS 2ÇTH JULY 1 949

Planting young tèa bushes in Assam

East Indies. As internal order is restored there, production will probably expand rapidly. With increasing supplies of fertilisers, the yields in India and Pakistan can be increased as indeed they can by what is known as coarse plucking. But these increased yields may be at the expense of quality teas and may provoke a reaction from that most patient purchaser- the British housewife.

Consumption The largest consumer of tea is the United Kingdom, which in 1947 to°k

420 million pounds. More important from the point of view of India and Pakistan is the fact that the United Kingdom takes half their production. The Ministry of Food in 1949 hopes to buy 300 million pounds of Indian tea. If ever the United Kingdom consumer reduces his consumption even fractionally below his present level of nine lb. per head per year that fact could spell a crisis in India and Pakistan. By contrast, if the American consumer could raise his consumption to more than nine ounces per head per year that fact would spell not necessarily increased prosperity but increased dollars for the equipment of India's new industries. The most significant item in the present consumption is the rapid increase of tea drinking in India and Pakistan. The potentialities of this market were recognised as far back as 1903 when the industry itself asked the Government to impose a levy on export teas, the proceeds to be used for promoting sales in India. By 19 15 consumption had risen to 20 million pounds, by 1945 to 150 million pounds, and during the

682



2ÇTH JULY I949 DEVELOPMENT OF TEA INDUSTRY IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN current year provided transport delays are overcome this figure will be exceeded. The Indian Army was an enormous consumer of tea and its returned soldiers will not abandon the habit. More important however has been the effect of inflation. Wages have risen sharply at a far greater rate than the price of tea. To its desirable qualities is added the fundamental fact that thousands can afford to buy it for the first time. In India, as elsewhere, it is the cheapest drink after water. This new demand comes at a time when India and Pakistan have export drives and tea is a most important export. In spite of an excise duty, Indian packers are buying export teas for internal consumption and their competition has caused the price of low- quality teas to be higher in India where the tea is grown than in countries several thousands of miles away. There are some who believe that India and Pakistan could consume all the tea these countries produce, though consumption which depends on the continuance of inflation is hardly a firm basis for prosperity. The inflationary symptoms have been repeated in North Africa and the Middle

683



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS 2ÇTH JULY 1 949 East. The effects of vast amounts of purchasing power pumped into these countries during the War have not worn off, and their demands for tea are increasing. With a world demand for petroleum from these countries, and the consequent increase in their purchasing power, it would seem that this demand for tea is likely to continue.

The Continent of Africa is probably the most promising new market for the teas of India and Pakistan. There, too, we are on the threshold of economic developments, and the lively activities of the Tea Market Expansion Board will undoubtedly introduce Africans to the value of tea. It is a popular theory that the anglo-saxon passion for tea is the determining factor in consumption. Although the consumption per head in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand is the highest in the world, and although the cottagers of Western Ireland remain the most discriminating purchasers of high-quality teas, there is much disappointment about the U.S.A. Consumption there has been falling, and the competition from the coco -cola and the coffee interests is keen and successful. It was from America that the lamentable invention of the tea bag came. These bags contain, in theory, enough tea to make one cup, but it has sometimes resulted in there being as many as 400 tea bags to the pound. What happens is that the consumer tries to get two or more cups from one bag. One lady proudly sent to her tea packer a used tea bag from which she had made ten cups of tea! To the alleged quick service of the tea bag must be added the more pernicious "dry service". This is a tea bag which sits alongside the spoon and is served with a cup of tepid water. Tea is made by the customer dipping the bag into the water.

One factor in the consumption of tea is the taxation it bears. Tea is so easy to tax, whether by a country which grows it or by a country which drinks it, or by both, that we are apt to forget that all consumers are not wedded to it. In addition to taxation there is now a large subsidy in its price - in England it is 10 'd a pound, in Australia it is 2 s a pound and in Eire it is 2 s 2 d. If subsidies are removed, will people continue to consume tea at the present rates? Will the Governments of Pakistan and India recognise early enough that their teas may not be able to carry an export duty of 4 'd a pound plus an import duty in the United Kingdom of 6 d and a subsidy of 10 'dl

Marketing Before the war, the London auctions in Mincing Lane attracted the teas of the

world because they attracted the buyers of the world. During the war bulk purchase of teas in India for allied and certain neutral countries was introduced and lasted till 1946. The United Kingdom decided that it would continue with bulk purchases whilst the Government of India decided that other countries should buy their tea in India. The system of bulk purchase tends to encourage quantity rather than quality production. Whether and when London auctions will be restarted is a difficult question. Meanwhile the Government of India is making special efforts to increase the importance of auctions at Calcutta and Cochin, whilst the Govern- ment of Pakistan is attempting to start auctions at Chittagong. Facilities at present are poor in India and Pakistan, whilst the climate militates against the storage of good quality teas. So long, however, as the largest buyer, the Ministry of Food,

684



2gTH JULY 1949 DEVELOPMENT OF TEA INDUSTRY IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN continues to buy for the world's most important market under a bulk contract, resumption of London auctions will be difficult if not impossible. It is doubtful whether the skill of Mincing Lane can be exported from the banks of the Thames to the banks of the Hooghly and the Karnafuli. What is not in doubt however is that until bulk purchase is replaced by auctions, the fully stretched and sorely tried British housewife will not be able to get the choice of blends she had in pre-war days.

Bringing in leaf from the garden , Macheyporey Assam

Having touched on the product I should like to end this talk with a comment on the man who makes it possible - the Indian labourer and his family. Much has been done recently to improve his wages and his working conditions, his housing and his health. Much remains to be done. Governments have pressed for more welfare measures with such zeal and with such a lofty disregard as to the availability of the materials with which, for example, new houses could be built that the industry has now to ask these Governments to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the

good. In the present inflationary conditions the best that can be hoped for is to consolidate the gains that have already been made. In the fight against disease and the struggle to improve nutrition the population in the tea gardens are better served than their brothers in the villages. With the passing of the seller's market it will be an achievement if all the present gains can be held.

I have made no mention of the research station maintained by the industry at Tocklai nor of the remarkable degree of co-operation existing between the industry and the Government in Ceylon and the Netherlands East Indies, which produced

685



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL' SOCIETY OF ARTS 29ТН JULY 1 949 one of the world's most successful schemes for the regulation of production and exports. The industry in India and Pakistan will continue to need this co-operation; and the role which they are assuming in South-East Asia is one of the most hopeful signs that, internationally and internally, this great industry will be well served by the new Governments of India and Pakistan.

DISCUSSION Sir John Woodhead, g.c.i.e., k.c.s.i. (Chairman, India, Pakistan and Burma

Section of the Society): Does Mr. Whittaker expect that consumption in the United States of America and Canada will improve?

Mr. Whittaker : I would suggest that the Canadian situation is much more hopeful than the American. In Canada tea is still the national drink, but consumption in America is falling, though I have no doubt at all that were the British Treasury or Government of India to release dollars to finance an educational programme in the United States, it might be possible to increase the consumption of tea there. But anyone who sees the remarkable advertising campaigns of the coffee-makers and the Coca-Cola group must wonder whether any reliance on the market of the U.S.A. for the prosperity of the tea industry in India and Pakistan is well founded. I am inclined tb think that there are other and newer markets which would yield better and quicker results.

Mr. J. Pitcher (British Empire Producers* Organization) : Do you not think that the objection to the tea-bag is rather overdrawn? It was not the tea-bag in America that I found objectionable, it was the fact that they never let you go out from the office at eleven o'clock for elevenses or at half-past four to have a cup of tea. Whenever I did slip out the telephone girl said I had gone out to the library for research, never that I had gone out for tea.

In our town they used to think tea drinking was rather "cissy". This reminded me of my grandmother in Scotland, who used to object to seeing men drink tea; she said the only liquid suitable for breakfast was whisky poured over porridge. In her early days tea had been much too expensive.

Dr. H. H. Mann (Woburn Experimental Station) : As one ¡who was the first scientific officer of the Indian Tea Association, and who went to India as far back as 1900, perhaps I may say something with regard to what has happened since, and to my experience of tea cultivation, not only in India but in the Middle East and in Africa.

First, just a note with regard to the early history of tea in India. The Assam Company was founded in 1839, and it had two boards of directors, one in London and one in Calcutta. They went on losing money year after year. They paid dividends out of their capital in 1843 and continued losing money until 1847, when the directors in London sent definite orders to the directors in Calcutta that the Company was to be closed.

But there was a group of people in Calcutta, led by a Calcutta merchant of that time called Henry Burkinyoung, who said: "No. In spite of our directors in London ordering us to close, we will not. We will raise sufficient capital in Calcutta and we will carry on". Burkinyoung sent up a new manager to Assam at that time, who was told to economize and try to make ends meet, and from 1847 to 1851 ends were just made to meet.

Then the man whose name is, I think, the greatest in the technical history of tea in India, George Williamson, came into the field. He was appointed manager of the Assam plantations, and was the first man who understood how tea should be grown and how tea should be plucked. In those early days the idea was - and it was inculcated by the Chinese - that as soon as you saw a green leaf on a tea-bush you plucked it. The result was that the tea-bushes very quickly ceased to give any yield at all. George Williamson in 1852 was the first one to realize that if you wanted to get tealeaf you had to allow the 686



2ÇTH JULY I949 DEVELOPMENT OF TEA INDUSTRY IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN leaf to grow, and he introduced the idea of simply letting the thing grow and then picking what you wanted after sufficient growth had been made.

The result was that the directors in Calcutta were very alarmed. Instead of getting their maximum yield of the year in the month of May, under Williamson's system it did not come until July, and a most alarmed letter was sent up from Calcutta to Assam, saying: "Why isn't the tea coming in? May, which is usually our biggest month, is past". I have seen the reply George Williamson sent down to Calcutta saying: "Do not be impatient. It will be all right." And so it was.

The profit from those gardens in Assam gradually grew from year to year until it was so successful that by 1856 the first garden was opened in Cachar, another district which afterwards became one of the great centres for tea production.

From my experience in the Middle East - that is, in the Caucasus, in Persia, in Turkey, and to a certain extent in Africa - I think the same mistakes that were made in Assam in its early history have been made in every new country. Two of these mistakes are particularly important.

The first is that in all countries they have planted tea without protecting the soil. When I first went to India in 1900 the soil in some of the old tea-gardens in Cachar, in Assam, and to a very large extent in Darjeeling, had been tremendously eroded. You saw the little tea-bushes standing on what looked almost like ant-hills. They were an illustration of what has happened in almost every country in which tea has been grown. One can see it in the Caucasus, and it was very bad in Persia. The only country I have known where it has not taken place is Turkey, where they went in for terracing right from the very beginning. The worst case of erosion I ever saw was on a British estate in East Africa, where the hillside had really washed down, and there were six or eight feet of eroded material in the adjoining valley.

The second mistake, which everybody has made, to pluck the leaves as soon as they appear, has resulted in yields of only 120 instead of a possible 400 to 500 lb. of tea.

That has happened in the Caucasus. I was sent for in 1930 to go to Russia and advise them with regard to theii tea plantatibns. They had got into an awful mess for this very reason. The same thing happened in Persia and is still happening today, in a still worse measure, in Turkey.

The Chairman : I am sure that I am only giving expression to what all of you think when I say thank you very much indeed to Mr. Whittaker for his able and illuminating - and illuminated - address. Speaking for myself, and as one who has been very closely associated with tea for nearly 40 years now, I can say truthfully that I have appreciated greatly all that Mr. Whittaker has said about an industry that means so much in the economics of India and Pakistan, and whose produce is to be found in more or less every household. Indeed, where would we be without tea? Ladies and Gentlemen, you are as well able to provide the answer to that question as I am.

Also on your behalf as well as my own I should like to thank the Tea Bureau för making the film, A Tale in a Teacup , available this afternoon.

Sir John Woodhead : It is my honour and privilege to propose a hearty vote of thanks to our Chairman, Mr. Nicholl. We are very grateful to him for sparing a certain amount of time from Mincing Lane to preside at our meeting today.

I have had some acquaintance with tea; in fact, over 40 years ago I was stationed in a tea district in Assam, a little place called Hailakandi, which I then looked upon as a place of perfect peace, of perfect "aram", as we called it. I well remember what Doctor Mann has referred to the old China tea-bush stuck on a little pinnacle on the top of a tilla, as small hills in Assam are called. Those China tea-bushes were still in existence at the beginning of this century when I was a young officer in the Hailakandi Sub- Division.

I will ask you to accord to Mr. Nicholl a most hearty vote of thanks.

The votes of thanks were carried with acclamation, and the meeting then terminated.

687



the development of the tea industry in india and pakistan

Documents