Tradition · tea-drinking tradition
Chai
/t͡ʃɑːj/
Also known as Cāy, Masala chai, Cha, Cutting chai, Spiced tea
Chai, black tea boiled with milk and sugar and often spiced with cardamom, ginger or cinnamon, is India's everyday drink, yet mass tea-drinking there is barely a century old. Tea grew wild in Assam and was used as medicine, but the plantations were built to supply Britain; Indians took it up only after the Indian Tea Association's campaign of the early twentieth century, which promoted tea breaks in factories and stalls on railway platforms, and vendors then made it milkier, sweeter and spiced.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Material
- black tea (often CTC), milk, sugar, spices
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The Indian Tea Association first disapproved of the vendors' spiced, milky chai, because extra milk, sugar and spice meant fewer tea leaves sold per cup. Its campaign was funded by a cess on tea exports passed in 1903.
Connections (4)
- Historical linkAssam tea, Jorhat
The leaf in most chai is Assam's. The East India Company began large-scale tea production in Assam in the 1820s from a variety the Singpho people already brewed; the first British garden opened at Chabua in 1837 and the Assam Tea Company began commercial production in 1840. The crop was grown for export, and by 1888 Indian tea sent to Britain exceeded China's. Only later did India drink it, and Assam remains the commonest base for chai, ahead of Darjeeling and Nilgiri.
- Historical linkMountain railways: Darjeeling
The railways are where India learned to drink tea. Arup K. Chatterjee calls the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway symbiotically rooted in the growth of Indian tea, and the Indian Tea Association, founded in 1881, made the railways its first major experiment. After the First World War vendors with stoves and kettles sold tea on station platforms in Bengal, Punjab and the Frontier, under posters in Indian languages, and the Association claimed a platform cup beat the first-class dining car's.
- PrecursorSurat
Spiced tea was drunk in India before the plantations, as medicine. John Ovington, writing of his 1689 voyage to Surat, observed that the Banias there, and he claimed all the inhabitants of India, took tea, then grown in China, with hot spices and either sugar-candy or conserved lemons, against headache, gravel and griping in the guts; Mendelslo had noted its semi-medicinal use in 1662. The colonial campaign made tea a daily habit, and street vendors put the spices back.
- Traditional linkBodhidharma
A legend, not history. In one apocryphal version of Bodhidharma's life, the Indian monk fell asleep during his nine years of wall-gazing, cut off his eyelids in anger, and the first tea plants sprang up where they fell, after which tea kept Chan monks awake in meditation. The legend makes India the giver of tea to China; the documented history runs the other way, with chai from Chinese cha and India's industry started from Chinese seed, including plants Robert Fortune smuggled out in 1848–49.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Masala chai", "History of tea in India" and "Indian tea culture". Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (2006), chapter "Chai: The Great Tea Campaign". Arup K. Chatterjee, "How chai arrived in India 170 years ago", The Hindu (18 August 2018).
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