Indian independence and its aftermath had an unexpected effect on the subcontinent’s tea industry. It created three industries: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
When the East India Company set out to create a parallel tea economy in the colonies, today’s Bangladesh was very much part of this exercise, being an extension of the eastern parts of India. Tea planting experiments in the 1840s included Chittagong, just south of Tripura. When the country of Bangladesh was created in 1971, and sought its tea origin story, some of the estates assumed significance, like the Malnicherra Tea Estate in Sylhet, planted in the 1850s.
Before that, Partition in 1947 cleaved the tea industry. And the newly created Pakistan now had prolific tea-producing districts in the east (then East Pakistan) and a large consumer base in the west.
Tea was popular in Pakistan, as it was in India, thanks to British marketing efforts, with chai the most popular form of the beverage. Pakistan’s tea map still carries the doodh chai, made with milk, sugar and black tea; noon chai, which is the pinkish green tea; the kehwa, with its green tea and saffron; and the Sulaimani, with lemon instead of milk.
Chai culture, too, is not dissimilar to its subcontinental origins. Lahore is home to the iconic Pak Tea House—it began as the India Tea House in 1940, started by a Sikh family. With Partition, the owners left and the cafe’s shutters came down. In 1948, it was reopened as the Pak Tea House and became a haunt for artists and intellectuals.
When Bangladesh was formed in 1971, it split the country’s tea industry once again, only this time it separated consumer from producer. It was not a clean break. The tea estates in the east bore the brunt of the war, and it took the next few years to rebuild the industry.
Meanwhile, the loss of this supply of black tea from Bangladesh was a big blow to Pakistan, which does not cultivate tea but has historically enjoyed a high tea consumption rate (currently around 1.2kg per person annually)—higher than India’s which is still under 1kg per person per year. To meet the country’s tea demand, Sri Lanka and Kenya stepped in. Even today, Pakistan’s tea imports are significant, so much so that in 2022 the government appealed to people to cut back “one or two cups of tea per day,” as the country was buying tea on loan.
Meanwhile in Bangladesh, production continues to increase, with Sreemangal emerging as a tea hub. Tea culture here shares more in common with eastern India—tea cabins and adda, doodh cha (milk tea) and rong cha (black tea), commonly drunk. And the Sreemangal seven-layer tea seems to be a local curiosity, a tea with seven layers, each a distinct brew varying in density.
Not a bad metaphor, I think, for three countries that shared a beginning but have since set off on very different tea journeys.
1001 Teas is a fortnightly series about the many stories hidden in the world of tea.
Aravinda Anantharaman (@AravindaAnanth1) is a tea drinker, writer and editor.