Chai’s Empire: The Journey from Colonial Commodity to Cultural Identity
The word chai means “tea,” and tea is the number two drink in the world, behind water. The discovery of tea comes from the story of an accidental encounter in China over five thousand years ago.
The legend is it was either a Buddhist monk or an emperor that discovered a green tea leaf had floated into their cup of boiling water and, after drinking it, felt awakened and alert. In the monk’s story, it helped him stay focused during meditation, so he shared it with his students so they could stave off sleeping during meditation.
In the emperor story, he thought it would make his soldiers attentive and energized, and he gave it to them before going into battle.
This is where the term tea mind comes from. Being clear, focused, and having a jolt of clean energy. We now know the evidence of the health benefits in tea: it’s antioxidant-rich, full of L-theanine and caffeine, boosts heart health, and reduces the risk of stroke and cancer.
I’d like to believe it was the former monk story that made this discovery. Don’t we have enough testosterone-induced war stories in our history? But knowing our history is deficient of stories from women, it seems more likely to me a woman would have been preparing hot water and discovered the tea leaf floating and steeping in the water.
Chai Tea in India
The popularity of chai in India evolved from a marketing campaign, a surplus of tea, a company hungry for profits, and a history rife with theft. The East India Company (formed initially to compete with Spain and Portugal in the lucrative textile and later spice trade) was a British corporation far more powerful than any government. As historian and writer William Dalrymple writes, “It was the first global corporate power that controlled both the economics and politics of half the world and exerted more control than Google, Tesla, Facebook, ExxonMobil, and Microsoft combined.”
Not only was the East India Company responsible for dominating trade, commerce, and governance in India—they were also the source of those 342 boxes of tea dumped into Boston Harbor in 1773.
It was shocking to learn it wasn’t the British government that completely colonized India; rather, for a century, a British business controlled many parts of India. The East India Company was setting up alliances with Indian kings and regional leaders, and hired Indian mercenaries to protect all their assets and profitable trade channels.
Arming them with weapons to protect their tea, opium, and exports—later to fight against and kill their own people. These corporate armies were double the size of the actual British government army. It’s strange to think of the power we’ve allowed businesses to wield. Multinational corporations overthrowing governments for profits, arming citizens and hiring mercenaries, and today, companies like SpaceX similarly exploring and then potentially exploiting new frontiers.
East India Company Vs. China: Tea Trade War
The more we learn about tea, the more its complicated history unfolds. In its two-hundred-year unbridled company history, the East India Company sold opium to China (from poppies grown in India) to pay for their tea.
China had a monopoly on tea at the time—it was the only country to grow, pick, process, sell, and export tea, or as they called it, liquid jade. But after the opium wars, which were fought over two flowers (poppies and Camellia sinensis), the East India Company stole tea seeds from China to cultivate in India, which created a sensation for the company and unleashed the Indian tea rush.
Just like our gold rush, men dreamed of fortunes made by cultivating tea from stolen seeds and sometimes stolen land (loot was the first recorded English word in India) to quench the thirst of the growing demand for tea in Great Britain and beyond. During the next four decades, thousands of acres were cleared and millions of seedlings planted in India.
Robert Fortune Brings Tea to America
It was a Scottish botanist named Robert Fortune, working for the East India Company, who became known as the greatest trade secrets thief of all time. He traveled by boat disguised in Chinese clothes and survived illness and pirate attacks to steal tea seeds from China that were then planted in India.
He was also responsible for bringing certain roses, peonies, the bleeding heart, azaleas, and the kumquat to the West. Before working for the East India Company, he was hired by the US to develop tea plantations in the South. He brought another batch of stolen seeds and set up his R&D farms in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, but the Civil War halted that work, and the only surviving tea garden from that experimental time is in Summerville, Georgia.
India was the largest producer of opium, controlled by the East India Company monopoly, with China at the time being the largest consumer. Today, they are the largest producer of opium gum sold to pharmaceutical companies, but Afghanistan is the largest overall producer (the sale of opium helps to fund the Taliban), and holds an 85 percent global monopoly on all opium, with large concentrations of heroin laboratories and end consumers all through Europe, the Americas, Russia, Iran, and Africa.
Masala Chai Wasn’t Tradition—It Was a Marketing Strategy
Indians didn’t drink tea, and all the tea produced there was exported, that is until the first marketing operation, or what we would later call in marketing a “drink occasion” campaign. But their attempts to foster a domestic market for tea faced a significant obstacle: it was the beginning of the Indian independence movement, and Indians viewed tea as a foreign, exploitative commodity. Gandhi labeled tea the “blood of the peasants of Assam.”
This was the drink of profiteers, greedy capitalists, and the drink of colonizers pillaging the land and mechanizing production for profits. It was also considered a vice like cigarettes and whiskey. Just like Ted Lasso, many Indians first thought of tea like hot brown water.
But when international tea prices dropped sharply in 1932, the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board started one of the most extensive marketing campaigns in Indian history. With a surplus of more than a hundred million pounds of tea, they saw the 350 million Indians as “thirsty throats awaiting initiation.” This was the beginning of a grand marketing campaign and the introduction of tea to Indians.
Academic Philip Lutgendorf described advertisements that proclaimed tea would make Indians more alert, energetic, and even punctual (read: better workers). Tea propagandists, or what we now call brand ambassadors or “social influencers” in marketing, were dispatched in the hundreds, sometimes in motorized tea vans, equipped to dispense millions of free samples of tea.
Posters created by commercial artists popped up all around the country of people drinking chai with the taglines “fights fatigue” or “healthy” printed in multiple languages.
Brooke Bond and Lipton sold their tea at subsidized prices so Indians could afford it when they were starting to form a habit. Then, they came out with the tea bags to give as samples for further drug-pushing tactics.
Another approach to foster addiction urged factory owners and office managers to set up free or subsidized canteens on their premises and offer an afternoon tea break to keep workers alert and attentive. Perhaps this is where Google got the idea of setting up onsite canteens with everything a worker could need to not go home.
The campaign also targeted women. It wasn’t Ayurveda practitioners or family recipes passed down through the ages that popularized chai, but corporate greed. Indians did put their flavorful culinary spin on the tea and added spices to create masala chai.
Brewing a Nation: How Chai Stirred India’s Modern Identity
Once accepted, Indians began drinking and experimenting with different variations, and, over time, chai became a place of pride as the national drink, as it is today. In less than fifty years, it became the largest tea-drinking country in the world.
These advertisements featured middle-class women, aristocratic women, and movie stars, showing it was the proper thing to consume tea for health, to reenergize and savor. With the debates around self-rule and independence, some argued that India wasn’t ready due to the uneducated and oppressed station of women.
Tea was touted as a vehicle for the women’s progressive movement and an empowering tool for intelligent, modern homemakers who understood the importance of good nutrition and daily teatime. In addition, the tea propaganda efforts adopted the independence movement’s nationalist rhetoric to champion tea as India’s national beverage that could potentially unify India’s diverse religious, linguistic, and caste groups.
Women did pass down their specific masala chai recipes to their daughters after the 1950s. During the first formal arranged marriage family meetings (which is still the norm in India but changing with the rise of online dating and choosing partners outside of family and caste connections), families are served chai and potential suitors are known to consider the recipe when deciding on a match.
If someone is raised drinking sweet chai, then being served spicy chai could be a sign that the potential marriage is not a fit.
Bhakti steeps black tea from Assam, known for its hearty malt flavor, which works well with milk and sugar. It’s in most English Breakfast and Earl Grey blends.
Assam is the region in Northeast India studded with lush hills, ridges, streams, a tropical river valley, and mountains on all sides but the west. Assam is the only region in India with indigenous tea plants, Camellia sinensis growing wild and first discovered in 1823 (or first documented) by Robert Bruce; then, after his death, his brother learned how to propagate, cultivate, and produce black tea from these green tea leaves.
It’s thought that the green leaves could have been consumed prior to the production of tea as a food for nutritional value. This is the region in Northeast India studded with lush hills, ridges, streams, a tropical river valley, and mountains on all sides but the west.
Assam is the only region in India with indigenous tea plants, Camellia sinensis growing wild and first discovered in 1823 (or first documented) by Robert Bruce; then, after his death, his brother learned how to propagate, cultivate, and produce black tea from these green tea leaves. It’s thought that the green leaves could have been consumed prior to the production of tea as a food for nutritional value.
The History of Chai Tea in India is fascinating. Our unique chai concentrate blends Indian traditions with healthy and delicious chai.