The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations

Abstract

In 1999, Darjeeling tea became India’s first Geographical Indication (GI). GI has proliferated worldwide as a legal protection for foods with terroir, or “taste of place,” a concept most often associated with artisan foods produced by small farmers in specific regions of the Global North. GI gives market protection to terroir in an increasingly homogenous food system. This article asks how Darjeeling tea, grown in an industrial plantation system rooted in British colonialism, has become convincingly associated with artisan GIs such as Champagne, Cognac, and Roquefort. The answer lies in a conceptual dyad that frames how British colonial officials, the Indian state, and international consumers have understood Darjeeling and its signature commodity. Since the colonial era, these actors have conceived Darjeeling as both an idyllic “garden” space and an industrial “plantation” space. As I show through an analysis of GI marketing materials and interviews with planters, pluckers, and consumers, this dyad maps in surprising ways onto labor relations. While planters’ and marketers’ discourses tend to emphasize the “garden,” laborers’ investment in GI lies primarily in an active—if also ambivalent—embrace of the plantation, encapsulated in the Nepali word “kamān.”