Producing a Culture of Consumption – The Tea Story

Tea along with coffee, chocolate and then sugar rewrote the human history of consumption in Europe and other parts of the world during the colonial era. Tea has been described as the most consumed substance on earth apart from air and water[1]. I situate my work on tea as part of a larger project of reading 1947 through the press. Aside from concentrating on the historically momentous events of the year, I am also looking at what are called commodities of the Raj. My point of entry into tea is advertisements in the six English language papers in five Indian cities namely – Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, New Delhi and Lahore. Advertisements of course are focused on the consumption of tea and that became my focus. In focusing exclusively in consumption I am aware that I am overlooking other very crucial aspects of the production and commercialisation of tea as a colonial enterprise. These include the clearing of large tracts of land, altering local ecologies forever, displacing countless people, the in-migration of labour especially into Assam, the appalling conditions under which this labour worked and the fact that tea industry was an almost totally white enterprise etc.[2]. I became intrigued by when exactly did Indians become mass tea drinkers and how did this story of tea consumption unfold.