Tea in the Dooars: gardens, workers and a long story

Tea needs many hands, all year. The Rajbanshi, Mech and other communities already living in the Dooars mostly kept to their own farms, so planters brought workers from far away. The largest numbers came from the Chota Nagpur plateau, in what is now Jharkhand and parts of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Bengal: Oraon, Munda, Santhal, Kharia and other Adivasi peoples. Recruiters, called sardars, brought whole families, who settled in labour lines on the estates. Nepali workers came down from the hills to the northern gardens.

These families made the Dooars what it is. Sadri, a language of Chota Nagpur, became the common tongue of the tea gardens and is still spoken in the lines today. Adivasi festivals such as Karam, when a branch of the Karam tree is planted in the village dance ground and the community sings and dances through the night, are as much a part of the Dooars as the forests. Churches, Kali temples and sarna sacred groves stand within a few kilometres of each other in many gardens.

Tea needed a way out. Chests went by river at first, then by rail. The Bengal Dooars Railway, a private company, built lines across the plains from the 1890s, linking the gardens with the main railway and the port of Calcutta. Parts of today's line from New Mal to Alipurduar follow that early network.

Planters, many of them Scots, built bungalows on stilts and clubs in the larger estates. Calcutta agency houses managed many gardens and sold their tea at the city's auctions, which began in 1861. After 1947 most British companies sold out to Indian owners over the following decades, and many gardens are now held by Indian companies, while a growing share of leaf comes from small growers who sell green leaf to bought-leaf factories.

The Dooars grows a different tea from the hills. Darjeeling's gardens, at 600–2,000 m, mostly make orthodox leaf tea, sold under a protected geographical indication. Dooars gardens, on the plains at 60–300 m, mostly make CTC tea: the leaf is crushed, torn and curled by machines into small granules that brew fast, dark and strong. It is the tea of the roadside stall and most Indian kitchens, made with milk and sugar.

Dooars bushes grow quickly in the heat and rain and are plucked from about March to November, with a pause in the dry, cool winter when the bushes are pruned. In March and April you see pluckers in the rows with baskets on their backs, and from the road the gardens turn bright green with new growth after the first rains.

Once you know what to look for, a Dooars tea garden tells its own story. The bushes are kept at about waist height, a flat plucking table that lets workers reach the two leaves and a bud at the tip. Tall shade trees stand in regular rows across the sections, cutting the harsh sun and adding nitrogen to the soil. Deep drains run between the sections, because the plains get very heavy rain and tea hates standing water.

Each garden has a factory with a tall chimney or a long, low withering shed, the manager's bungalow set back in a garden of its own, and the labour lines, rows of workers' houses, near the edge of the estate. A small market, a school, a church or temple and a football ground usually sit close to the lines.

Forest and tea run into each other here. Elephants walk through gardens between Gorumara, Chapramari and the Jaldapara forests, and leopards often live in the tea rows themselves, hunting dogs and goats in the lines. That is why estate managers ask visitors to stay out of the sections after dark.

The story is not all tidy rows. Tea garden wages have long been low, and the Plantation Labour Act of 1951 put duties on owners to provide housing, water, medical care and schooling in addition to wages. When prices fell and some owners walked away in the early 2000s, a number of Dooars gardens closed or were abandoned, and reports of hunger and deaths in closed gardens made national news. Some have reopened under new owners; others remain troubled.

Wage rates, land rights for families who have lived in the lines for generations, and the future of small growers are still argued over in Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar. A visitor sees beautiful gardens; it is fair to know what life inside them can be like.

Unlike Darjeeling, the Dooars has few gardens set up for tourists, and factories are working premises, not attractions. Most visitors see the gardens from the road between Malbazar, Chalsa and Binnaguri, or walk the estate roads around Samsing, Chalsa and Lataguri with a local guide. A few resorts are set inside tea estates and arrange garden walks. Ask before photographing workers, and never walk into the rows at dusk, when elephants and leopards use the gardens as corridors.

If you want to taste the difference between grades, buy small packets of CTC from a local shop and brew them the way garden families do: boiled with water, milk and sugar in one pan, strong enough to stand a spoon in. Then try a Darjeeling orthodox tea, brewed plain, on the same day. The contrast explains more about the two regions than any museum could. Buy from a shop that sells loose tea by weight and turns its stock over quickly; CTC loses its strength after a few months in an open sack, so ask when the batch came in from the garden.

• Best months to see plucking: March to May and again in autumn, from late September to November.
• Good roads for garden views: Odlabari to Malbazar, Chalsa to Nagrakata, Binnaguri to Birpara.
• Buy loose CTC from a local shop in Malbazar or Birpara rather than from gift tins.
• Respect garden boundaries; estate roads are private, so ask the guard or your host first.