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Take a sip of North-East India's indigenous teas
Summary
Parag Hatibarua, a renowned tea expert, uncovers and preserves India's indigenous tea cultures, revealing unique traditions like Mizoram's foot-rolled teas
The Indian tea story is dominated by the colonial creation of the plantation industry and the birth of the commodity tea industry that puts India in the top 2 of global tea producers. The more interesting stories, however, are of the lesser-known teas and tea cultures with no colonial ties at all. Much of this is in the North-East and it makes sense when you consider the lay of the land and the proximity to Yunnan in China, the birthplace of tea.
Parag Hatibarua, tea taster, educator and consultant, has been working to discover, protect and preserve the indigenous tea cultures of the North-East. In 2011, he created a tea sommelier course for the International Tea Masters Association. As students began to arrive at Guwahati (where he lives) from across the world to learn about tea, he saw it as an opportunity to keep up his own education. “It made me dive deeper and study more," he says about how it set him off on his journey as a “tea hunter". It took him to Arunachal Pradesh, where he worked with Omak Apang of Donyi Polo tea estate to set up their speciality production (email dpteoyan789@gmail.com to place an order). And to Manipur, where he worked with Boi Gangte and Forest Pick (Forestpick.com) to produce extraordinary wild-grown teas . Since then, he continues to explore the North-East regularly and as reward, comes to experience traditional and indigenous tea customs and tea styles, such as one in Mizoram, where he came upon tea rolled by feet.
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Darzo village in Mizoram is hard to reach, taking 6 hours by road from Aizawl. Its tea connections are unusual. In the 1970s, says Hatibarua, Tea Board India planted tea but the project was soon abandoned because of lack of infrastructure and unavailability of people to work in tea cultivation. Whatever was planted, propagated. Additionally, tea was already growing as it was in Assam and these parts. While there was no commercial cultivation, the villagers chose to harvest the leaves for their own use. With no electricity and no machinery, they devised their own processing style—rolling the leaves with their feet, chopping it with a four-pronged mallet and sun-drying the tea.
Interestingly, there is another community where tea is rolled by foot, and that’s in Indonesia’s Cigedug village where the last of the artisans making this style have been recorded. Hatibarua calls it the kejek tea. Two villages, countries apart—it’s not so strange to find these connections among places that come within the sphere of Yunnan’s influence.
Darzo’s tea is not (yet) easy to source as commercial production hasn’t taken off. Hatibarua likens its appearance to Turkish tea, dark coloured but not as strong, brewed with water and enjoyed plain, and with an earthy taste. I do hope we are able to draw these teas out and celebrate their uniqueness, far removed from tea as we know it. And that’s precisely what makes it exciting, a tea made without much fuss but yet so rich in heritage.
Tea Nanny is a fortnightly series on the world of tea.
Aravinda Anantharaman is a Bengaluru-based tea blogger and writer who reports on the tea industry. She posts @AravindaAnanth1.
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