Introduction

In the spring of 2009, as florescent green buds were sprouting up on the tea bushes after a winter of dormancy, in what is known as the “first flush,” I was sitting outside the manager’s office of a large tea plantation in Darjeeling, India, high in the Himalayan foothills. While I was waiting to interview the manager, I chatted with the office didī (literally, “older sister”) over a cup of tea. In Darjeeling plantations, the office didī was a hybrid position of secretary and servant, and depending on the plantation, her role leaned to one or the other of these poles. Here, she held a more secretarial position. We joked about the state of the desk in the foyer, where she often had to work, examining random pieces of scratch paper with cryptic notes or lists of numbers without qualifiers. Managers would dump these papers and unmarked files on the desk as they passed through. A glossy piece of paper poking out from under a stack of file folders caught my eye, and I slowly pulled it towards me, trying not to disrupt the desk’s stratigraphy. It was a poster, with trails of more cryptic numbers scratched on it. I asked what it was for. She said that the sahib (manager) gave posters like this one out to visitors to the factory. These kinds of marketing materials frequently arrived from Kolkata with instructions about display or distribution. She told me to take this one home with me.

An antique-looking scroll unfurled on the poster asked:

What is it that makes the world’s tea aficionados rush to Darjeeling during springtime to “book” the first flush teas?

The answer?

… Darjeeling Tea just happens.

The reports blame it on the mixed soil, the pristine air, the well orchestrated rainfall, the lofty altitude, the optimum humidity levels—and how they have all come together uniquely to make Darjeeling Tea Darjeeling Tea.

To science, Darjeeling Tea is a strange phenomenon. To the faithful, it is a rare blessing.

… Darjeeling Tea, hand-plucked by local women with magician’s fingers … is manually sorted, packaged and begins its world tour. The only problem with Darjeeling Tea is that there is never enough of it to satisfy the connoisseurs around the world.

But then, the finest things on earth are like that—very very rare—or they would not be considered the finest.

This was one of the first of many encounters I had with such Darjeeling tea advertisements, which the Tea Board of India, the government regulator of the tea industry, distributed. The advertisements were part of the Tea Board’s efforts to market Darjeeling’s “Geographical Indication,” or GI, an international legal distinction that protects Darjeeling tea as the “intellectual property” of the Indian government. In a global market that is calling for locally sourced, socially responsible, and environmentally friendly commodities, Darjeeling tea planters and the Tea Board looked to GI to distinguish their product from other Indian, African, and blended teas on the market. GI is a nationally and internationally regulated property rights regime that legally protects a wide range of products, from artisan cheese to fruits to handicrafts. Notable GI beverages include Champagne, Cognac, Tequila, Scotch, Bordeaux, and Kona coffee. The producers of these products (and the governments of the states or countries in which they are produced) advocate for GI status on the grounds that their products can only be made in certain locales by certain groups of people. The assignment of GI status to foods rests on the assumption that they possess a unique terroir, or “taste of place.” Terroir derives not only from biophysical conditions but also from distinct production practices. Marketing for terroir products tends to emphasize the roles that both unique ecological landscapes and skilled artisans play in creating them.

Over the course of ethnographic fieldwork I carried out in Darjeeling and Kolkata between 2006 and 2012, the Tea Board petitioned the European Union (an important market for fine teas) to recognize Darjeeling’s GI. Darjeeling’s tea plantations date back to the British colonial era, and as I show in this article, the organization of landscape and labor in the region has been remarkably consistent from the British era to the present. Since the designation of Darjeeling tea as a GI product in 1999, the region’s tea industry has witnessed a resurgence: closed plantations have reopened, and tea is fetching higher prices. GI enables place to stand in for a product. Many of us know that Champagne is sparkling wine, that Roquefort is cheese, that Scotch is whiskey, and that Vidalias are onions, without being told so. The Tea Board and the Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA) wanted consumers to associate “Darjeeling” with these GIs—luxury products with territorial distinction. This association was often quite overt. Another remarkably stark poster, which the office didī dug out from under a stack of papers after I expressed interest in the first one, featured a picture of three glasses labeled: “Cognac. Champagne. Darjeeling!”

The poster continues:

Our very own Darjeeling Tea joins the global elites.

The whole world now recognizes the fact that this magical brew owes its unique eloquence to its place of origin, the misty hills of Darjeeling.

Darjeeling Tea has now been registered as a GI (Geographical Indication) in India. Which officially places Darjeeling Tea in the esteemed company of a Cognac or Champagne—other famous GIs.

The unique geographic conditions of Darjeeling help make its teas such a rarity. Just the way Cognac and Champagne are rare because they can only come from specific regions in France.

To celebrate this new rise in status for India, just raise your cup!

How did an industrial plantation crop with a less than savory colonial past become a product with an authentic terroir, placed uncritically next to Champagne and Cognac? One answer to this question lies in the way the Tea Board framed tea plantation labor. An arduous and exploitative productive process had to be replaced with something else: something craft-like. To make this replacement discursively and materially possible—and thereby to make plantation production palatable in the world of terroir products—required contemporary plantation owners and Tea Board officials to resolve what their colonial forbears called the “Labor Question.” Colonial planters’ Labor Question concerned how to maintain a settled and reasonably healthy labor force in burgeoning Indian tea districts (Chatterjee 2001). The contemporary Labor Question does not focus on the acquisition of labor, but instead on how planters, hoping to export to international markets for boutique tea, worked to recast the unpleasant colonial legacy of plantation production as a palatable national heritage of craft production. In asserting a luxury distinction for Darjeeling tea, as well as a natural connection between laborers and tea plants, the language of terroir embedded in GI marketing and promotional materials produced a sanitized image of Indian plantation life and labor.

GI marketing materials and legal structures certainly do produce ideas about place and labor that diverge to a great extent from the realities of plantation life, but as GI has taken hold in Darjeeling, laborers themselves have become willing participants in the materialization of terroir. Laborers worked not only to produce tea but also to make manifest the images of “naturally” intertwined place, product, and labor that GI discourses and marketing materials evoked when they referred to Darjeeling plantations as “gardens.” Establishing terroir would seem to be a challenge on tea plantations, where buildings, machinery, and even plants date back to the mid-1800s, the height of British colonialism, and where the management of Nepali laborers by non-Nepalis largely mirrors colonial forms. Nevertheless, in Darjeeling, plantation labor and its colonial past were far from ignored or hidden from view: instead, they were, rather successfully, packaged and performed as “heritage.”

GI is part of a complex set of practices that enrolls tea planters, marketers, and even low-wage plantation laborers in producing terroir. Drawing on anthropological analyses that link luxury consumption practices, discourses about qualities of food production, and the “invention” of national or regional food “traditions,” I argue that the distinction of Darjeeling as a unique taste was legally and performatively tied to the governance of Darjeeling and the activities of tea laborers, as part of a bounded place. I draw primarily on interviews with tea planters; officials from the Indian Tea Association, the Darjeeling Tea Association, the Tea Board of India; and Kolkata-based tea brokers, tasters, and distributors. I contextualize these interviews in insights from fieldwork on Darjeeling tea plantations and an analysis of GI-related marketing materials. In the next section, I situate my argument in social scientific critiques of GI and terroir. The third section provides background on Darjeeling’s GI. The two sections that follow explore 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 tourists who visit Darjeeling plantations, this dyad maps in surprising ways onto labor relations. While planters and marketers’ discourses tend to emphasize the “garden,” laborers’ investment in GI lay primarily in an active—if also ambivalent—embrace of the plantation, encapsulated in the Nepali word “kamān.”

Placing taste: the cultural production of terroir

The analysis of GI in this article highlights the work of protection and perception that this legal and market distinction performs. GI’s supporters in India claimed that it protected Darjeeling tea from imitation; that it protected a unique agricultural landscape and the people who worked in it from being engulfed by competition in an undifferentiated marketplace; and that it protected Indian national economic interests by differentiating Indian tea from other varieties. At the level of perception, GI sought to reshape how consumers understood the taste of Darjeeling tea. GI asserted that Darjeeling had a terroir. Descriptions of the environment of Darjeeling—the rainfall, the altitude, the humidity, and the “magical” fingers of local women tea workers— defined that terroir. In a classic understanding of terroir, taste is endowed by the geology and climate of the region in which food is grown (see Wilson 1998), but in my analysis of Darjeeling tea GI promotional materials, I want to underscore that terroir—the “taste of place” that GI protects—is a cultural, rather than a natural phenomenon. GI depended on a perception of tea-producing labor as making a unique and inimitable contribution to terroir.

Terroir and luxury consumption

In a growing market for goods marked “organic,” “fair trade,” or “local,” consumers appear to be searching for value from three interrelated sources: bureaucratic or legal certification, the sensory “taste” of food quality (and by extension, environmental quality), and the cultural “taste” of class “distinction” and refinement (Bourdieu 1984). Terroir products protected by GI legislation and embossed with a GI label meet this tripartite standard of value. Appeals to geographical distinction play into the desires of Northern consumers who are demanding more of a global food system in which food “… comes from a global everywhere, yet from nowhere that [consumers] know in particular. The distance from which their food comes represents their separation from the knowledge of how and by whom what they consume is produced, processed, and transported” (Kloppenburg et al. 1996, p. 34). In consuming Champagne over sparkling wine, Roquefort over blue cheese, and Darjeeling over generic English Breakfast, buyers can see themselves as supporting “traditional” forms of craft food production as well as imbibing luxury distinctions associated with place. Distinction and rarity have a price. GI products are more expensive precisely because they come from somewhere in particular and because they must travel across the globe in sophisticated networks to make it into consumers’ cups (Heath and Meneley 2007).

Critical analyses of the link between the construction of terroir and practices of luxury consumption have pointed to what Guy (2011, p. 460–461) calls the “immaterial labor” of building images of “authenticity” and “naturalness” into terroir products. Consumer beliefs about authenticity occlude the work of marketing and branding that go into the making of terroir, as well as the “material” labor of food production. Discourses about terroir “[minimize] the place of labor and … workers, whether these are artisanal cheese and wine makers or seasonal migrant laborers” (Guy 2011, p. 462; see also Laudan 2004). Guy’s critique of the immaterial labor of terroir in the making of Champagne resonates with anthropological analyses of coffee by West (2012) and Roseberry (1996), and of olive oil by Meneley (2004, 2007, 2008). These scholars all argue that the pursuit of distinction through place-based products actually depends upon a radical change in the perception of the qualities of those products. In the case of olive oil, as Meneley has shown, the religious and ritual significance of the substance in Mediterranean contexts differs significantly from the scientifically based claims about its healthful qualities in Western fad dieting (Meneley 2008). Nevertheless, consumers of olive oils, like consumers of “relationship coffees” from small specialty roasters (Doane 2010), see themselves as buying qualities directly associated with specific people in specific places (see also Trubek 2008).

As Weiss (2011) showed in an anthropological study of “local” “heritage” pork, consumers must learn the taste of place. In the Piedmont region of North Carolina, this learning took place in farmers markets, restaurants, and exclusive tasting events and was transmitted by specialists trained in the dietary habits of pigs and in the growing genre of “meat science” (Weiss 2011, p. 446). As Weiss explains, “[heritage pork] (and its taste) is an amalgam of animal husbandry, marketing strategies, and social networking” (Weiss 2011, p. 452). Similarly, as I show below, consumers and connoisseurs have learned to regard Darjeeling tea, with its light smoky flavor, as the “Champagne of teas.” The Tea Board of India’s marketing materials were educational and instructional, not only in the how-to details of brewing, steeping, and storage, but more importantly in messages about how to enjoy Darjeeling tea as a distinguished good. The advertisements taught consumers of this high-end GI to reconcile their desire to purchase a luxury good with the knowledge that tea was grown on colonial plantations. As in Guy’s descriptions of Champagne, a product whose terroir-related discourses hid the material conditions of labor in plain sight, Darjeeling’s terroir created “a retreat into a nostalgia for the past that works to create a bundle of silences around agricultural labor” (Guy 2011, p. 462).

Terroir and the quality of production

Without the work of marketing, it would be difficult to see Darjeeling tea as simultaneously good to drink and “good to make” (Paxson 2012). Consumers learn to see the foods most commonly associated with terroir, including fine wine, farmstead cheese, heritage pork, olive oil, and foie gras, as artisanal products, not as colonial or industrial goods. Anthropological studies of foodways and taste have long called attention to the interface between imaginative and symbolic practices surrounding the consumption of plants and animals and the material organization of their production (e.g., Mintz 1985). GI-based marketing promotes a perception of an agricultural landscape that highlights relationships between craftspeople and the things they make, but not every producer counts as a craftsperson. The elaborate discourse about the terroir of French wine and Wisconsin cheese, for example, certainly does not include the seasonal or migrant labor that goes into their production (Guy 2011, 1997). On Darjeeling plantations, however, wage laborers were too prominent to be cut out of the marketing picture. The Tea Board of India and planters, in advocating for Darjeeling’s GI protection, recast tea’s industrial production as craft production—a process done in small batches by “magical fingered women,” not disenfranchised interchangeable labor. In Darjeeling, GI recast the plantation as a landscape in which tea workers and tea bushes lived in symbiotic unity. According the GI narrative, laborers acted as stewards for the “natural” potential of Darjeeling tea. Everything else, as the poster describes, “just happened.”

As Paxson (2006, 2012) notes, what makes farmstead cheeses and other terroir products taste good is related to the values embedded in explanations for why these cheeses are “good to make.” Such explanations of goodness and appeals to social values, as Weiss (2011) shows, appear in the repeated and highly structured way in which consumers and sellers learn about the foods they exchange. Paxson describes the attempts by cheesemakers in Vermont and Wisconsin to “reverse engineer” terroir: to devise strategies for making cheese that seemed compatible with particular environmental conditions. This required developing particular cheesemaking “skills” or “place-making practices” (Paxson 2010, p. 453). Most terroir products, however, are not reverse engineered. In the case of Darjeeling, the values of terroir were assigned to ongoing productive practices, rendering field labor into traditional knowledge. As Heath and Meneley (2007) have argued, when place-based products enter a global marketplace, claims to distinction based on the qualities of productive practice tend to be imbricated in global productive and consumptive processes (such as the monitoring of chemical “quality”), which are underwritten by decidedly placeless technical and scientific authorities.

Terroir and the invention of tradition

Crafting products, as Terrio (2000) has suggested, means crafting history. Terroir emerges not only from luxury consumption practices and ideas about the qualities of production but also from “invented” national or regional traditions of food production (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Trubek et al. 2010; Ulin 1995). Eric Hobsbawm defines “invented tradition” as “a set of practices … which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior … which attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past” (Hobsbawm 1983, p. 1, emphasis added). Contemporary Darjeeling tea production under GI was selectively linked to colonial plantation production. Darjeeling’s colonial past did not disappear, but it was re-valued and made “suitable” for contemporary consumers. An association with quality of taste and quality of production is essential to terroir, but that association tends to be based upon assumptions about historical continuity.

Boisard, in his examination of Camembert, what he calls “the odorous emblem of France” (2003 [1992], p. xi) and a recognizable terroir-based product, argues that this product, naturally associated with Frenchness, is actually embedded in “national myths” about the French nation-state. Similarly, Guy (2003) in her study of Champagne, another comestible symbol of the French nation-state, describes how the production of uniquely French wines was tied up in rural populations’ integration into the nation. Though France can be most readily identified with discussions of taste and its relationship to place, terroir has become a global commentary on the values, histories, and characteristics of certain foods, as consumers become more aware of the origins of their food (Trubek and Bowen 2008).

Political economic critiques of terroir, GI, and food labeling

In this article, I analyze how tea, an industrial plantation crop whose production owes as much to colonial labor organization as to skilled artistry, has become a legally protected GI, complete with a terroir that consumers recognize and seek to experience for themselves. This question is especially pressing, since terroir, food localism, and GI have been associated with movements against the globalization of the food system and the exploitation of farm labor, and for the conservation of sustainable environments and traditional practices (Trubek 2008; Bowen 2010). Even if terroir is as much a process of class distinction as it is a “natural” feature (Bourdieu 1984), wage laborers (and issues of political economy more generally) rarely make it into social scientific depictions of terroir food production, even though many GI products are industrial food crops (e.g., Washington apples, Vidalia onions). As West (2012) notes, the producers of commodity food crops (in West’s case, Papua New Guinean coffee) actually become re-fetishized through place-oriented marketing. In a similar critique of the tendency among scholars and activists to see GI, fair trade, organic, and other labels as successful instances of consumer-based resistance to commodification, Guthman (2007) argues that such labels create markets (for craft labor, place, and ecological conditions) where none previously existed. By creating new markets, such labels necessarily change the nature of labor itself.

For conscientious consumers, the locally bounded craft of artisans contrasts with the regimented (and arguably place-less) labor of industrial agricultural workers (Meneley 2007). As Bowen and Gaytán (2012) suggest with reference to the assignation of GI status to tequila in Mexico, the confluence of nationalism, globalized marketing, and state support has allowed large tequila distillers to hijack the terroir discourse at the expense of the small “artisan” agave producers GI is at least partly meant to benefit. Thus, GI has serious limitations as a strategy for rural “development” (Bowen 2010). Bowen argues elsewhere that the “embeddedness” of products in places can be destabilized by the very processes of certification and labeling that attempt to maintain it (Bowen 2011).

GI and its attendant terroir discourse thus often fail to protect the small farmers they claim to be helping, and in the case of industrial crops, perceptions of terroir underwritten by labels may occlude labor conditions altogether (Guy 2011). Elsewhere, Guthman (2004) has argued that “local food” and organic movements create an “agrarian imaginary” of farm labor that does not hold up to empirical scrutiny and elides rather than addresses the inequalities that persist at all levels of the food system. This critique is important for understanding how GI becomes a legitimate label for former colonial crops, such as Darjeeling tea, that are grown and processed under conditions that have changed little since the colonial era. As I argue below, the GI scheme in Darjeeling attempted to recast tea plantations as “gardens,” as sites of luxury consumption and craft production. The implications for laborers were considerable. They began to recast themselves in line with these discourses, working not only to produce tea but to perform terroir, paradoxically working to mask the conditions of tea’s production even as they produced tea. First, however, I provide further background on how Darjeeling tea became a GI.

Making Darjeeling a Geographical Indication

A promotional film distributed by the Tea Board of India to tea retailers opens with a British tea shop owner sitting in her London café, reflecting: “I grew up thinking that Darjeeling was just a tea …” (DTA 2001). Then, with the exaggerated movement of a cursor on a map, we follow her from London to foothills of the Indian Himalayas, where she climbs aboard the “Toy Train,” the narrow gauge railroad that has transported tea and tourists since the 1860s, and begins a slow journey up the mountainside to Darjeeling.

The next day, while shopping for tea in the market, she meets a tea plantation manager, Mr. Kumar. Over a pot of Darjeeling tea, the scratchy and stilted, dubbed-in voice of Mr. Kumar describes Darjeeling’s Geographical Indication status:

The reputation, the characteristics, of the renowned tea that has been produced over here are essentially attributable to the geographic location, climate, and even the soil … That’s the magic of Darjeeling.

Mr. Kumar whisks her down to a tea plantation. They stop on the side of a plantation access road. Grabbing a handful of wet dirt, Mr. Kumar explains, “This is the soil that produces the sweet brew of Darjeeling … see?” The teashop owner gingerly pinches the soil. As they walk behind a large group of female laborers, Mr. Kumar continues: “Tea leaves are handpicked by tea garden workers, 70 % of whom are women. Perhaps it is the warmth of their touch that gives the brew such sweetness.”

Mr. Kumar and the tea buyer watch the women, clad in bright red chaubandis. (Red is the color of fertility, and chaubandis are the “traditional” female dress of a united Hindu Nepal. For the record, I usually saw them wearing men’s button down shirts to work, never chaubandis.) As the rains start, the laborers break out into trilled folksongs, mimicking a Bollywood musical aside. The women smile from ear to ear while they toss handfuls of green leaf into the baskets strapped to the top of their heads. Rhythmic claps punctuate the song as well as their tea plucking movements.

Later in the film, the tea buyer muses: “I started … exploring the mountains that are home to rhododendrons, wild orchids, and a thousand other flowers. Oh! And the birds … some six hundred kinds. When you drink a cup of pure Darjeeling, you drink all of this in.”

We see the tea buyer later that afternoon, writing in her journal on the verandah of a Raj-era palace-turned-hotel. Excerpts from her journal refer not to the tea, but to the people and the environment that produce it: the “breathing mountains,” “musical brooks,” “hardened exteriors,” “smiles of genuine people with genuine pride.” After a long sip of amber tea, she remarks: “Mr. Kumar made me realize the significance of the laws protecting Darjeeling tea. It is thanks to these laws that the flavor of pure Darjeeling has worked its magic for me.”

In the film’s descriptions, the environment of Darjeeling—the rains, the mists, the loamy soils, and the beautiful Nepali tea laborers—are integral to the taste, quality, and terroir of Darjeeling tea. The viewer-consumer of this advertisement is reassured that the environment is not only natural and pristine (despite their application, agrochemicals never figure into discussions of the terroir of any product) but also populated by female workers who have such an idyllic work environment that they are compelled to dance and sing throughout the day. The film implies that “the laws protecting Darjeeling tea” protect the purity of female tea laborers as well.

Wines, liquors, and cheeses have long been the objects of place-based distinctions and governance. In broad terms, a “Geographical Indication” is any material or linguistic symbol used to establish that a product comes from a particular location. Contemporary national and international GI laws descended from national laws aimed at curtailing the imitation or falsification of products whose values were linked to place of origin and traditional forms of production. Though it has undergone several transformations throughout the twentieth-century, one of the first systems for the protection of the Geographical Indication of food products is the French appellation d’origine côntrolée (AOC), first codified in 1905. Food items that meet AOC regulations that verify that they are made in a particular geographical location (one that confers a distinct terroir) can have a French government issued stamped on them (Colman 2008). By the middle of the twentieth-century such national laws had spread outside of France, and in 1958, the Lisbon Agreement created a common “appellation of origin” protection for products originating in signatory countries, mostly from Europe.

The 1994 World Trade Organization Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement reaffirmed and extended the right of national governments of member states to grant GIs. Under the Indian Geographical Indications Act of 1999, Darjeeling Tea became the first of India’s now almost 200 registered GIs (GOI 2013). Other agricultural products now governed by Indian GI legislation include Basmati rice and Alphanso mangoes. The 1999 legislation also protects a large number of handicrafts, such as Kullu shawls and Kancheepuram silk (GOI 1999). This national legislation endowed the Tea Board, and by extension the Government of India, with “ownership” over the words “Darjeeling” and “Darjeeling tea” as well as the Darjeeling tea logo (see Fig. 1).Footnote 1

Fig. 1
figure 1

The Darjeeling tea logo

Full size image

The 1999 Indian GI Act recast the name “Darjeeling” and the logo as certified trademarks owned by the Government of India, and regulated by the Tea Board of India. The Tea Board describes Darjeeling’s status as a GI:

Darjeeling tea is India’s treasured Geographical Indication and forms a very important part of India’s cultural and collective intellectual heritage. It is of considerable importance to the economy of India because of the international reputation and consumer recognition enjoyed by it (Tea Board n.d.).

According to the Tea Board of India, “Darjeeling tea” is only produced on 87 plantations in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal.

Mr. Kumar’s narration in the film I described above echoes the definition of Geographical Indication in Article 22, Paragraph 1 of the TRIPS Agreement, which defines GIs as “indications which identify a good as originating in the territory of a Member, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to its geographical origin” (emphasis added). India’s 1999 legislation regarding Darjeeling’s GI echoes that definition. A report of the World Intellectual Property Organization, an agency of the United Nations that manages global patents, defines Darjeeling’s GI with reference not only to the plantations, with their “perfect soils and environmental conditions for tea cultivation,” including wind speed, clouds, fog, and amount of sunshine, but also with reference to the “traditional knowledge” of female tea plantation laborers (WIPO 2011). The report states:

Because the tea bushes in the Darjeeling region are the rare camellia sinensis … two leaves and a bud must be picked. The traditional knowledge the women possess ensures that they can … pick Darjeeling tea while being careful to protect … the bushes from any undue stress … the traditional knowledge and production practices … [differentiate] Darjeeling tea from other teas …Footnote 2

With the labor of plucking tea on plantations couched as “traditional knowledge,” GI lent support to ideas about a natural connection between plants and people.

Indian Tea Board officials touted the conversion of Darjeeling tea into intellectual property as, above all, a means of “protecting” the product from imitators. Nepal, which lies only a few miles west of many Darjeeling tea plantations, has a similar climate, sloping mountain tea fields, and, of course, a large population of Nepali laborers. Darjeeling’s GI, as the Darjeeling Tea Association Secretary and numerous Darjeeling planters told me, exists in large part to protect Darjeeling tea from Nepal tea. These officials, along with tea retailers, argued that Nepal tea could not have the same taste as Darjeeling because the conditions of its production were fundamentally different. Still, planters claimed, tea retailers continued to pass off Nepal tea, often mixed with other teas, as “Darjeeling.” The DTA Secretary often claimed that there were over twenty tons of “so-called Darjeeling” produced each year, but less than ten tons actually grown and manufactured in Darjeeling. Figures like this, drawn from planters’ estimates, provided a key justification for the 1999 law granting Darjeeling a Geographical Indication. One Canadian tea buyer I interviewed, who buys both Nepal and Darjeeling tea and markets them separately, maintained that this “myth of overproduction” was a deliberate strategy to stimulate demand. He and other tea buyers argued that Nepal tea was just as good—grown in the same environmental conditions with younger bushes, with an added bonus. Nepal tea was cheaper because it did not carry the “Darjeeling” label (Rao 2005).

Gardening the kaaman: GI, traditional knowledge, and craft production

In her office in the towering Tea Board of India building in the heart of old Kolkata, a Tea Board executive responsible for the administration of Darjeeling’s GI speculated in an interview with me that the region’s history may have made the Darjeeling “brand” easier to “position”:

It just so happens that Darjeeling has developed a market of its own … So, when we started off on the GI exercise, the brand had actually already been positioned. Maybe because of certain activities that have taken place historically or because of the fact that it is a product with certain benefits and attributes which have … been liked by people.

The job of GI marketers, she explained, was to link people’s tastes—what they already liked about Darjeeling—to a specific place. She continued:

If somebody thinks that Champagne is just a sparkling wine, then France will find it very difficult to protect Champagne as a GI because America would say that Champagne has got nothing to do with origin and is just a sparkling wine and would taste a certain way and that’s it. You need to communicate. You need to promote. You need to tell people what it’s all about. You need to convey the fact that a GI has something to do with the origin, reputation, quality, characteristics … So, you have the legal side, you have the administrative side, [and] you have the side that’s linked with promotion.

Legal, administrative, and promotional activity certainly figured heavily in Darjeeling’s GI, but the Tea Board official’s cryptic reference to “certain activities that have taken place historically” signals that terroir depends upon the mixing of timeless environmental qualities (soils, air, climate) with a sense of return to a mode of production that belongs somewhere in the historical past.

Unlike coffee, tea is a rather geographically undifferentiated market. Consumers frequently drink teas from Malawi, Java, Bangladesh, or Cambodia, but these teas are rarely distinguished as such. Tea from across the globe is instead commonly blended into varietals, such as “Earl Grey,” “English Breakfast,” and “Russian Caravan” which can be sourced from any tea-growing region or grade. These teas, blended from broken leaf and dust grades, make up the bulk of the international tea market. There is little demand within India for Darjeeling tea, as the price is exponentially higher than the price of tea produced in Assam, the Dooars, or other Indian tea-producing regions. Darjeeling tea workers and town residents I met actually preferred these cheaper, extra-local teas. Tea workers frequently reminded me that Darjeeling tea was grown for foreign consumption. Foreigners, they explained, liked halkhā chiyā (“light tea”). Workers also explained that foreigners preferred tea grown in the mountains. Workers knew the place of production was significant.

Darjeeling’s distinction as a good tea thus comes from its associations with a pleasant taste and a restful place. The town of Darjeeling, surrounded by some 87 plantations, was established by the British initially as a sanitarium for convalescing soldiers to recover in the cool mountain airs. The refuge quickly grew and developed into a “hill station” and the summer capital of British India. Regarded for its recuperative airs and misty mornings, Darjeeling has long existed in Indian and Western imaginaries as a place of purity, an accessible Shangri-la. Since 1835, when Darjeeling was established, the region has been simultaneously conceived of as both a site of industrial agriculture and as a site of rest and leisure. The opening of E.C. Dozey’s popular history-cum-guidebook to Darjeeling describes the recuperative powers of the Darjeeling hills:

In the strenuous days when the struggle for existence shackles men to their desks, or keeps them tied to counters in the sweltering heat of the plains, the very mention of Darjeeling recalls memories of the last but too short week-end during which as much of the pleasure as was possible was pressed into it (1922, p. 1).

Darjeeling guidebooks and gazetteers, at the same time, describe the regimentation and productivity of Darjeeling’s plantations:

The plantations were models of neatness and order, and the planters are always willing to explain each process and the reason for it to visitors. The Nepalese coolies, too, are very interesting. In spite of a pretty liberal coating of dirt, some of the women are good-looking, and men and women alike are a happy-go-lucky lot, cheerful and in good condition … They are well paid and well housed, and each family has its little patch of cultivation rent free (Newman & Company 1900, p. 50–51).

Darjeeling’s dual identity as a site of both industry and refuge is encapsulated in a linguistic dynamic, between the Nepali word for “plantation,” kamān, used by workers to describe their work place, and the English word “garden,” used both historically and by the Tea Board’s GI marketing materials to describe tea plantations. Kamān is of disputable linguistic origin, derived from the English words “command” or “common,” or perhaps even colonial British planters’ use of the imperative “Come on! Come on!” to communicate with workers. Kamān evoked the oppressive aspects of plantation life: the repetitive plucking, pruning, and maintenance of a commodity crop. Kamān also signals the materiality of the plantation and an industrial mode of production: the factories, machines, and division of labor as well as the rugged physical topography, heat, and rains that make tea plucking so difficult. The use of kamān reminded my interlocutors of the plantation land tenure system, managed by affluent men and staffed by thousands of low-paid wage laborers of Nepali origin, who live in cramped villages amidst the sweeping fields of tea (kamān busti). The word kamān evoked regimented work schedules, repetitive labor, and routine submission to the weights and measures of management. On the kamān, nothing is “natural.” Even the tea bushes, camellia sinensis, were imported from China to Darjeeling in the mid-nineteenth-century to satisfy British consumers’ demand in the wake of the Opium Wars. For Darjeeling tea to become a GI, this colonial agricultural legacy had to be repackaged, not removed.

The DTA and Tea Board believed that by thwarting the blending of Darjeeling tea with other teas—particularly Nepal tea—GI has given struggling plantations a better market. Nepal and Darjeeling tea are remarkably similar in every way—the taste, climate, topography, and bushes. But there is one clear difference: the kamān. Nepal tea is not grown on a kamān. The word for a tea cultivation landscape in Nepal is bāri (literally, “non-irrigated or dry field”). Producing communities in Nepal are relatively new; they are not the product of British colonialism. Nepal tea-growing operations hire laborers from the villages that surround the bāris. Darjeeling tea plantations, on the other hand, are staffed by the descendents of pluckers recruited by British planters beginning in the mid-1800s. Darjeeling plantations are relatively larger and vertically integrated. Each plantation is staffed by 600 to 1,000 permanent workers, who labor under the supervision of field managers who answer to more powerful plantation managers (or “planters”) and ultimately to plantation owners.

As shown in the quotations above, the word “Darjeeling” has long been associated with restful, garden-like qualities. Contemporary GI-based promotions harness these garden images to discursively supplant those of the kamān. One promotional brochure, in text set next to a picture of a demure Nepali woman, head dropped towards the tea bush, describes “Life on the Gardens”:

It’s an idyllic existence close to nature’s heartbeat. That’s what makes this tea so unique. The tea pluckers sing of the tiny saplings which bend in the wind as they work. A melody of greenness surrounded by blue skies and the sparkle of the mountain dews. And tied to the circle of life, the tea bushes sustain themselves, day in and out, season after season, through the years. Life on a plantation is a completely natural, refreshing state of being (DTA n.d.).

Another GI marketing poster hails the connection between “gardeners” and tea:

Thankfully, the Darjeeling Tea Estates have always lived by their faith—by humbly accepting this unique gift of nature and doing everything to retain its natural eloquence.

So, Darjeeling Tea, hand-plucked by local women with magician’s fingers, withered, rolled and fermented in orthodox fashion, with the sole intention of bringing out the best in them [sic] (DTA n.d).

Marketing, of both female tea workers and the plantation environment they inhabited, thus supplemented legal boundary-making to render a complex production system and relationships between tea bushes, labor, and management into a single, fetishized, feminized element of mystical “nature.”

In her ethnography of female tea laborers on a Dooars plantation, to the south of Darjeeling, Chatterjee (2001) describes a similar process, whereby popular tea brands like Brooke Bond and Celestial Seasonings sexualize female tea workers and fetishize their delicate hands. Chatterjee notes the way in which the feminization of tea merges ideas of labor and leisure, as the soft hands of tea pluckers (juxtaposed against their hard bent backs) echoes the soft touch of the genteel colonial female tea drinker. The marketing strategy for Darjeeling’s GI goes one step further, transforming female laborers into “ecologically noble,” hyper-fertile features of a timeless landscape (Doane 2007). This combination of legal definition and market imagery was largely directed at bulk buyers in the EU and USA who might otherwise have “unscrupulously” adulterated Darjeeling tea with Nepal tea. Ironically, however, the marketing materials abounded with pictures of women dressed in traditional Nepali chaubandis and depicted with the features that made Nepali women desirable not only to British colonial appetites but also to contemporary Indian ones: light skin, bright eyes, and glossy black hair.

Talk of a limited number of “gardens” bounded by discrete borders not only produced the impression that “true Darjeeling” was rare, it also gave a physical location to the “traditional knowledge” on which the Tea Board’s claims to intellectual property were based. It was not only the landscape but also the natural connection between land, labor, and product that planters and bureaucrats referred to when they discussed Darjeeling’s terroir. GI marketing materials were replete with descriptions of the environment of Darjeeling—an environment of which the rainfall, the altitude, the humidity, and the warm fingers of local women tea workers were all parts.

Tasting tea, tasting labor: “heritage” tourism and the performance of terroir

Despite the meticulous reference to plantations as “gardens” (GI promoters I interviewed used the terms kamān or “plantation” as rarely as Nepali workers used the term “garden”), the persistence of the kamān in the postcolonial era was central to Darjeeling’s distinction. Unlike GI promoters, tea workers were surprisingly vocal about the importance of maintaining the kamān system. As I noted above, for Nepali tea pluckers, kamān referenced not only a site of highly regimented work but also the location of their homes and villages. In the decades after Indian Independence and prior to the establishment of the GI, many tea plantations closed or scaled back production. In the 1970s and 1980s, starvation deaths, landslides, and outmigration took a toll on life in the kamān busti. Many former tea laborers and their children began migrating to Darjeeling town, Delhi, and Kolkata (and even back to Nepal) in search of work.

Beginning in 2008, I made regular visits to laborers at Kopibari Tea Estate,Footnote 3 a plantation that had been closed for three years. A new owner had pushed its tea through fair trade and organic certification. He intended to capitalize on those labels, as well as GI, to turn Kopibari into a “tea resort.” Tourists who visited Kopibari were given tours of the tea-processing factory, a coal-fired plant whose machines, the tourists were told, dated to the British era. (Coal, too, is an important element of Darjeeling’s terroir and heritage. Tasting experts in Kolkata claim that coal-operated machinery imparts Darjeeling’s special “muscatel” flavor). Tourists were also given the opportunity to meet a retired tea plucker, Bishnu, who would invite them into an old one-room village shack she had converted into a small café. There, she would demonstrate the “proper” way to brew and drink Darjeeling tea.

Bishnu called herself “the Five Second Lady” because she could prepare a cup, she said, in just “five seconds.” She brewed broken Darjeeling leaf from her monthly ration for tourists. If you swish that grade of tea in hot water for five seconds, the brew will attain the light amber color seen in the promotional pictures. As she drank a cup of the five second tea with visitors, Bishnu would extol its health benefits and remind them that they could find this very tea in Harrods department store in London. She would also remind visitors that the proper way to consume Darjeeling was lightly brewed, with no sugar or milk. It was, she said, an “acquired taste.”

Even in the absence of tourists, workers like Bishnu were regular consumers of Darjeeling tea. In fact, drinking Darjeeling tea (with milk and sugar, or with salt) was part of how labor was reproduced. Pluckers received 350 g of low-grade broken leaf Darjeeling tea (produced at Kopibari’s factory, but not deemed fit for international circulation) as part of their monthly food ration. Throughout a day in the field, workers sipped sugar or salt tea from reused liter-sized “XXX Rum” bottles. On afternoons and weekends, I would sit with female workers as they would steep this ration tea (or, after the 350 g ran out, cheap tea produced in the plains of India and purchased in the local bazaar) into a strong, dark brew. They knew that a cup of Darjeeling tea in the United States cost more than they made in a day (just over $1.00 in 2010). Tourists and tea buyers who visited the plantation told them this. On days off, plantation workers would go to town to the bazaar and see the faces of Darjeeling tea workers—of women just like them—plastered onto billboards (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Billboard outside of the DTA, 2009

Full size image

The model Darjeeling tea workers on the billboards were smiling, dressed in pukka Nepali (“totally Nepali”) clothes: in red chaubandis, handing the implicit consumer a cup of light amber tea. Workers ridiculed the chaubandi as the dress of old Nepali women or villagers who migrated to town in search of piecework, and they found such lightly brewed tea (presumably without sugar) unappetizing. But even as they mocked such images, pluckers on plantations like Kopibari, where tourism was as important as tea production, worked to reproduce them.

Both domestic and international tourists traveled to Darjeeling to consume Darjeeling tea on Darjeeling tea gardens. But they also wanted to see the material elements of kamān—the factory, the antique machinery, the hand-plucked tea, and the bungalows. In Darjeeling, these colonial legacies of the kamān were discursively recast as “heritage.” “Heritage” tea plantation tourism emphasized the experience of the plantation, where the colonial means of tea production—the coal-fired processing factories, the 8-h plucking days, and female laborers with bent backs portering tea leaves—were stops on the tour. These material symbols of British colonial development and domination over the tea industry are essential to both the high market value of Darjeeling tea and the tourist experience. Tourism provided a confirmation that Darjeeling plantations were not imaginary: that there were aspects of both the “garden” and the kamān that could be experienced materially. Whereas on a winery or brewery tour, tourists come to view the technologies of production in action, “heritage” tourists come to witness “living history,” “the simulation of life in another time” [Anderson (1983) quoted in Handler and Saxton 1988, p. 242]. Active, visible laborers were required to provide both of these experiences. Tea pluckers could not simply work; they had to pose as workers. They had to present themselves both as contemporary tea producers and as plausible simulators of past tea producers. The set pieces for this performance were already in place; again, the mode of tea production in contemporary Darjeeling is largely the same as in the colonial era. On Darjeeling plantations with tourism projects, workers posed for pictures, let tourists borrow their tāukoris (head baskets used for collecting tea), described how “peaceful” the plantation was, and even sang a song or two. GI couched tea pluckers as possessors of traditional knowledge that was tuned to a delicate ecosystem. In tourism, workers willingly played the role of “gardener” for tourists, against the background of the kamān. While GI media made the plantation hyper-real, tourism sutured the experience of consuming tea to that of consuming place.

In recent years, tea plantation tourism has boomed. Plantations are converting bungalows into tourist lodging and encouraging visitors to see tea production and experience the Darjeeling distinction for themselves. They can, as a New York Times travel reporter writes, “compare styles and improve their palates” and immerse themselves in “a teetotaler’s version of a Napa Valley wine tour” (Gross 2007). In order for the plantation to be itself consumable, it had to be remade further, from relic of an oppressive colonial past to proud regional “heritage.” A heritage tourist experience depended on reminders of the spatial and class divisions of the kamān. One planter explained to me that tourists wanted a “colonial experience,” and that in order to compete with other plantations, he needed to provide this for them. At Lindendale Tea Estates, for example, a double occupancy room complete with bed tea, picnics, bird watching, and day trips to Kalimpong and Darjeeling runs between $400 and $500 a night. A review of Lindendale in Condé Nast Traveller reports:

[The bungalow] stands as an unselfconscious reminder of an era when graciousness effortlessly prevailed … The guests who stay now are given the opportunity to see the day-to-day workings of the estate … and its labor-intensive routines (which don’t appear to have changed in centuries) … Visiting [Lindendale] is like arriving in a little corner of heaven—and almost as remote (Blackburn 2006, p. 70, emphasis added)

Tourists, too, worked to perform terroir. As a visitor to Windsor Tea Estate put it when I asked her why she came to that particular garden, “We drink their tea, and we wanted to know more about it.” Many of Darjeeling’s GI marketing materials echo the strategies and mimic the rhetoric pioneered by Keshav Roy, Windsor’s owner. Beginning in the early 1990s on an otherwise marginal plantation, Roy helped make Darjeeling India’s first GI through both advocacy with the Tea Board and tourist projects. In a multifaceted fetishization project, he turned the workers and the environment of Windsor into consumables. In the process, he remade himself, as a Raj-era planter incarnate, as well as the workers and the soils, elements critical to Darjeeling’s terroir, all consumable in a cup of Darjeeling and knowable by experiencing that cup on his plantation.

Every day at Windsor, tour groups filtered in and out. If they were lucky, they would have an audience with Roy himself, a captivating storyteller. I followed some of these tours around the factory and tasting room to hear Roy wax to visitors about the “rhythms of nature,” the “terrestrial infirma,” and how they had become “harmonious” at Windsor. He peppered narratives about tea manufacturing with memorable and provocative one-liners, such as “they are looking for favor in the balance sheet, not flavor in life” (a biting criticism of other tea plantation owners). If guests asked for sugar or milk, Roy would chastise them: “Would you put milk in your glass of Champagne?”

At Windsor, visitors could not only learn to drink tea from Roy, a fourth generation plantation owner who preferred meeting guests in his khaki safari suit, but also help laborers in “volunteer projects” such as repairing houses and building latrines. The tourist experience made GI’s “garden” imaginary material, but by literally re-building plantation villages and residing in Raj bungalows above them, tourists, planters, and laborers together materially reproduced the kamān.

Conclusion: terroir and the obliteration of labor

While legal administration and promotion have helped establish Darjeeling’s garden image at an imaginative level, then, the terroir to which the GI label attests depends upon materiality and visibility, manifested ironically in the kamān. A colonially derived production process, along with geographical ideas, had to become tangible and digestible. An ugly colonial past had to be repackaged into a garden “heritage,” something that was itself consumable through tea tourism. Ethnographies of artisanal food production highlight the affective relationships farmers and consumers have towards products as well as to the agricultural environments that produce them. In her study of American farmstead cheese, Paxson (2010, p. 445) shows how cheese makers “reverse engineer” terroir, using the idea of an intimate connection between environment, producer, and product—the same ideas invoked in Darjeeling’s GI—to create new agricultural practices that are suited to particular places (or ideas about those places). In post-GI Darjeeling, tourism required Darjeeling tea laborers to physically manifest the imaginaries presented in marketing materials and stipulated in GI law. In the context of tea tourism, laborers viewed their work not as the transformation of the plantation into an idyllic garden but as a revitalization of the kamān. Tea workers did not participate in tourist projects because they were coerced, or because they had any particular investment in ideas of ecological purity or “traditional knowledge.” Nor were tea laborers “reverse engineers,” working to make their practices suitable to the landscape. Instead, they were re-builders. Their acquiescence to the imaginaries surrounding GI amounted to a knowing performance: a plantation version of the industrial worker’s strategic “consent” to self-exploitation (Burawoy 1979). This consent was a response not only to the will of management but also to the material realities wrought by a volatile tea market. It was evidence of workers’ longstanding participation in the ideological construction of Darjeeling as both refuge and industrial space that predates GI by some 150 years. More than anything else, it was laborers who embodied the dualism of kamān and garden, and it was labor—colonial plantation labor—that was essential to the terroir of Darjeeling tea.

Workers saw the revitalization of the plantation—the revitalization of the kamān—through new marketing schemes and tourism projects as allowing them to stay in their villages on the plantations. Before the market upturn brought on by GI, fair trade, organic and other international certification schemes, plantations closed and women were forced to find work in town, breaking rocks and portering luggage. By most accounts I collected, these jobs netted them more money than plantation work. Workers, however, returned to work on reopened plantations. I asked why. Time and again, I was told that manual labor in town was not desirable, because it took workers away from the kamān busti, from homes and family. Workers knew that international consumer demand was critical to the stability of the plantation. The revitalization of the tea industry through GI allowed the kamān to once again become a stable site of both home and work.

With the increased popularity of alternative agriculture movements that are framed as resistance to the inequities in the global food system, scholars have begun to interrogate how the ideals of alternative agriculture intersect with the material conditions of food production (Guthman 2004; Lyon 2011; West 2012). In this article, I have shown how, through GI, wage laborers become meaningfully engaged in value as a legal, sensory, and “distinctive” practice as well as an economic one. The post-colonial Indian tea plantation offers a chance to investigate the place of old (and often disquietingly inequitable) regimes of labor in new regimes of value, including GI as well as organic, fair trade, and biodynamic. Previous scholarship has linked food localism and terroir to either the fetishization of labor or its wholesale erasure in favor of “agrarian imaginaries” (Guthman 2004). While it is true that GI marketing and legal codes offer a misleading view of the plantation labor process, I have shown in this article that the power of taste comes not just from “invented” consumer imaginaries but also from material conditions that workers themselves knowingly reproduce.

Darjeeling’s GI and its attendant marketing reconcile and repackage several dualities: kamān and garden; industry and ecological refuge; production and consumption. The language of GI yokes these dualities into a coherent image of a palatable place and product. In Darjeeling, both the culturally constructed “nature” of the tea “garden” and the labor relations of the kamān became the intellectual property of the Tea Board of India. Through GI, Nepali laborers, who were often ostracized within their own country as “outsiders,” were all of a sudden included within the Indian nation state as the holders of the “traditional knowledge” behind Darjeeling tea—a piece of national patrimony and intellectual property.