Geographical Indication and Darjeeling Tea Plantations

Agric Hum Values (2014) 31:83–96 DOI 10.1007/s10460-013-9452-8 The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations Sarah Besky Accepted: 13 March 2013 / Published online: 15 June 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract In 1999, Darjeeling tea became India’s first DTA Darjeeling Tea Association Geographical Indication (GI). GI has proliferated world- GI Geographical Indication wide as a legal protection for foods with terroir, or ‘‘taste TRIPS Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property of place,’’ a concept most often associated with artisan Rights foods produced by small farmers in specific regions of the Global North. GI gives market protection to terroir in an increasingly homogenous food system. This article asks Introduction how Darjeeling tea, grown in an industrial plantation system rooted in British colonialism, has become convincingly In the spring of 2009, as florescent green buds were associated with artisan GIs such as Champagne, Cognac, sprouting up on the tea bushes after a winter of dormancy, and Roquefort. The answer lies in a conceptual dyad that in what is known as the ‘‘first flush,’’ I was sitting outside frames how British colonial officials, the Indian state, and the manager’s office of a large tea plantation in Darjeeling, international consumers have understood Darjeeling and its India, high in the Himalayan foothills. While I was waiting signature commodity. Since the colonial era, these actors to interview the manager, I chatted with the office didı¯ have conceived Darjeeling as both an idyllic ‘‘garden’’ (literally, ‘‘older sister’’) over a cup of tea. In Darjeeling space and an industrial ‘‘plantation’’ space. As I show plantations, the office didı¯ was a hybrid position of secre- through an analysis of GI marketing materials and inter- tary and servant, and depending on the plantation, her role views with planters, pluckers, and consumers, this dyad leaned to one or the other of these poles. Here, she held a maps in surprising ways onto labor relations. While more secretarial position. We joked about the state of the planters’ and marketers’ discourses tend to emphasize the desk in the foyer, where she often had to work, examining ‘‘garden,’’ laborers’ investment in GI lies primarily in an random pieces of scratch paper with cryptic notes or lists of active—if also ambivalent—embrace of the plantation, numbers without qualifiers. Managers would dump these encapsulated in the Nepali word ‘‘kama¯n.’’ papers and unmarked files on the desk as they passed through. A glossy piece of paper poking out from under a Keywords Labor Plantation Terroir Tourism Tea Á Á Á Á Á stack of file folders caught my eye, and I slowly pulled it India towards me, trying not to disrupt the desk’s stratigraphy. It was a poster, with trails of more cryptic numbers scratched Abbreviations on it. I asked what it was for. She said that the sahib AOC Appellation d’origine coˆ ntroleé (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 S. Besky (&) Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, distribution. She told me to take this one home with me. 101 West Hall, 1085 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA An antique-looking scroll unfurled on the poster e-mail: [email protected] asked: 123 84 S. Besky What is it that makes the world’s tea aficionados rush plantations date back to the British colonial era, and as I to Darjeeling during springtime to ‘‘book’’ the first show in this article, the organization of landscape and labor flush teas? in the region has been remarkably consistent from the British era to the present. Since the designation of Dar- The answer? jeeling tea as a GI product in 1999, the region’s tea … Darjeeling Tea just happens. industry has witnessed a resurgence: closed plantations The reports blame it on the mixed soil, the pristine have reopened, and tea is fetching higher prices. GI enables air, the well orchestrated rainfall, the lofty altitude, place to stand in for a product. Many of us know that the optimum humidity levels—and how they have all Champagne is sparkling wine, that Roquefort is cheese, come together uniquely to make Darjeeling Tea that Scotch is whiskey, and that Vidalias are onions, Darjeeling Tea. without being told so. The Tea Board and the Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA) wanted consumers to associate To science, Darjeeling Tea is a strange phenomenon. ‘‘Darjeeling’’ with these GIs—luxury products with terri- To the faithful, it is a rare blessing. torial distinction. This association was often quite overt. … Darjeeling Tea, hand-plucked by local women Another remarkably stark poster, which the office didı¯ dug with magician’s fingers … is manually sorted, pack- out from under a stack of papers after I expressed interest aged and begins its world tour. The only problem in the first one, featured a picture of three glasses labeled: with Darjeeling Tea is that there is never enough of it ‘‘Cognac. Champagne. Darjeeling!’’ to satisfy the connoisseurs around the world. The poster continues: But then, the finest things on earth are like that—very very rare—or they would not be considered the finest. Our very own Darjeeling Tea joins the global elites. This was one of the first of many encounters I had with The whole world now recognizes the fact that this such Darjeeling tea advertisements, which the Tea Board of magical brew owes its unique eloquence to its place India, the government regulator of the tea industry, of origin, the misty hills of Darjeeling. distributed. The advertisements were part of the Tea Darjeeling Tea has now been registered as a GI Board’s efforts to market Darjeeling’s ‘‘Geographical (Geographical Indication) in India. Which officially Indication,’’ or GI, an international legal distinction that places Darjeeling Tea in the esteemed company of a protects Darjeeling tea as the ‘‘intellectual property’’ of the Cognac or Champagne—other famous GIs. Indian government. In a global market that is calling for locally sourced, socially responsible, and environmentally The unique geographic conditions of Darjeeling help friendly commodities, Darjeeling tea planters and the Tea make its teas such a rarity. Just the way Cognac and Board looked to GI to distinguish their product from other Champagne are rare because they can only come Indian, African, and blended teas on the market. GI is a from specific regions in France. nationally and internationally regulated property rights To celebrate this new rise in status for India, just raise regime that legally protects a wide range of products, from your cup! artisan cheese to fruits to handicrafts. Notable GI beverages include Champagne, Cognac, Tequila, Scotch, Bordeaux, How did an industrial plantation crop with a less than and Kona coffee. The producers of these products (and the savory colonial past become a product with an authentic governments of the states or countries in which they are terroir, placed uncritically next to Champagne and Cog- produced) advocate for GI status on the grounds that their nac? One answer to this question lies in the way the Tea products can only be made in certain locales by certain Board framed tea plantation labor. An arduous and groups of people. The assignment of GI status to foods exploitative productive process had to be replaced with rests on the assumption that they possess a unique terroir, something else: something craft-like. To make this or ‘‘taste of place.’’ Terroir derives not only from replacement discursively and materially possible—and biophysical conditions but also from distinct production thereby to make plantation production palatable in the practices. Marketing for terroir products tends to empha- world of terroir products—required contemporary planta- size the roles that both unique ecological landscapes and tion owners and Tea Board officials to resolve what their skilled artisans play in creating them. colonial forbears called the ‘‘Labor Question.’’ Colonial Over the course of ethnographic fieldwork I carried out planters’ Labor Question concerned how to maintain a in Darjeeling and Kolkata between 2006 and 2012, the Tea settled and reasonably healthy labor force in burgeoning Board petitioned the European Union (an important market Indian tea districts (Chatterjee 2001). The contemporary for fine teas) to recognize Darjeeling’s GI. Darjeeling’s tea Labor Question does not focus on the acquisition of labor, 123 The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor 85 but instead on how planters, hoping to export to interna- surprising ways onto labor relations. While planters and tional markets for boutique tea, worked to recast the marketers’ discourses tend to emphasize the ‘‘garden,’’ unpleasant colonial legacy of plantation production as a laborers’ investment in GI lay primarily in an active—if palatable national heritage of craft production. In asserting also ambivalent—embrace of the plantation, encapsulated a luxury distinction for Darjeeling tea, as well as a natural in the Nepali word ‘‘kama¯n.’’ 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 Placing taste: the cultural production of terroir and labor. GI marketing materials and legal structures certainly do The analysis of GI in this article highlights the work of produce ideas about place and labor that diverge to a great protection and perception that this legal and market dis- extent from the realities of plantation life, but as GI has tinction performs. GI’s supporters in India claimed that it taken hold in Darjeeling, laborers themselves have become protected Darjeeling tea from imitation; that it protected a willing participants in the materialization of terroir.

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