Tangible Presence

One of the largest areas for tea growing is around a town called Munnar, sat in the foothills of the Western Ghats mountain range in Kerela, South India.

It is from the tea bushes of these hills that familiar and well known brands such as Tetley Tea are produced. Tetley Tea is the biggest tea brand in the UK and is itself owned by one of the biggest companies in India: Tata (well known in India for being the company behind the ubiquitous Tata lorries and trucks which keep India moving).

Around 200 years ago the British arrived in this area of India and, finding the climate agreeable to tea growing, cleared most of the trees which then covered the landscape and planted in their place the now ubiquitous tea bushes. The resultant landscape is one of exposed rolling hills overlain with a thick green layer of tea plants, of strikingly uniform height, interlaced with the dark winding paths taken by the tea cutters.

Tata is the paternalistic employer of the region. The tea cutters work for around 10 hours a day with morning and afternoon breaks and a long lunch. They are not paid a great deal, even by Indian standards, but their children are provided with free schooling and each worker is guaranteed free medical care. Each family is also given a small allotment on which to grow their household vegetables and keep some animals. Benefits such as these make the lifestyle into a much more attractive package which explains why families willingly remain as tea pickers for their entire life. The work is divided by gender with the women spending their days amongst the plants picking or cutting the plants and carrying the bulging sacks of leaves down from the slopes to the weighing houses, so their pay can be calculated. The men meanwhile, populate the warehouses, engaged in the processing of the leaves into the familiar dark tea we see in our tea bags and, to a lesser extent, the Indian green tea which has also recently found a market here in the west.

Walking around the landscape one is struck by the intensely ‘man-made’ nature of the environment. In its own way it is as artificial and as intensely managed as any city park. Though it is much more peaceful. The only sound is the 'clack clack' of the cutting tools used by the women as they wend their way in small groups through the tea bushes. One never knows exactly where such groups will be but they are easy to spot in their bright clothing and the sound of their cutting carries far across such an otherwise undisturbed landscape. With the cutters always held at waist height this constant snipping of new growth is what causes the entire area to be of such a noticeably uniform and closely trimmed height. Occasionally one will happen upon a group of worker's houses nestling in a sheltered spot amongst the hills. Children would come streaming out and the odd face would peer from a doorway and smile.

Most of the tea plants in the photographs date from the British colonial era, making them almost 200 years old. They are only now beginning to be replaced and replanted, as they begin to lose their high yield levels in their old age. Looking across the landscape one is struck by its uniformity, its strangeness and its cultural importance. It has a strangely abstract quality but it is the tea workers within it who make it come alive. It is, after all, an agricultural landscape as much as our own farmland, though one created for a singular, one-product market. Its amusing to realise that, without the British obsession with tea, none of this would exist.