The Simplicity and Complexity of Countless Cups of Tea

By Austin Cope ‘15, Jagori Grameen Fellow 2018-2020

In some cafes throughout the United States, it’s possible to order a “chai tea latte.” It’s usually a sweet, foamy beverage, sometimes hot, sometimes iced, made with a mix of spices and even a little tea. Though the recipe is supposedly based on an Indian beverage (masala chai), the other similarities are very few. Those differences especially include the name--calling it “chai tea” is completely redundant, since the word chai in Hindi simply translates directly to “tea.” This baffles many people from India I’ve spoken to about the subject, as they shake their heads and wonder how we Americans have become so confused.

Before I arrived in India, I admit that I had occasionally ordered “chai tea lattes.” They felt like a break from my usual coffee, and I liked the cozy feel of the spices mixed with the milk and the tea. But since coming to India, I have learned that what many Americans think of as “chai” (let’s try to forget about the “tea latte” part) hardly scratches the surface of tea culture in India.

In India, chai’s preparation and presentation is much less grandiose than in America, but the beverage reflects a much more complex set of global relationships, both historic and contemporary. And although it’s impossible to fully unpack those relationships in one narrative, it is clear that drinking chai in India means so much more than simply a choice of beverage at a coffee shop.

Living and working as a Shansi fellow in northern India for the past nine months, I have drunk cup after cup of tea. (I will use the word “tea” interchangeably with “chai,” since they mean the same thing.) For example, the main office of my NGO, Jagori Grameen, has two chai breaks for its employees a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The Training and Research Academy (TARA) staff serves the tea in a large metal urn with a spout on the front, and we drink it from steel cups that we wash ourselves afterwards.

A cup of chai at a tea stall in Sidhpur, near Rakkar.

I don’t think the day at Jagori would feel complete without the chai breaks-- they are the points where everyone in the office can come together in the same place and enjoy a break from the tasks at hand. But it’s not limited to chai breaks. When my colleagues and I leave the main office to visit surrounding villages, we drink chai whenever we stop at people’s houses, and sometimes along the way when the trip gets long.

Members of Jagori’s TARA staff enjoy chai and conversation during the afternoon chai break.

Outside of work, drinking tea is just as common. My friends and I have drunk countless cups from a general store in Rakkar, where the storekeeper serves it from small glass tumblers for 10 rupees apiece--the general rate around Dharamshala. I drank chai on rainy afternoons in Mussoorie during my Hindi language school last year, on cold mornings in Delhi while waiting for events to start, and on warm days in Kerala during my trip there in January. It has come in metal, clay, china, glass, and paper cups, and with varying degrees of sweetness, milkiness, and strength of tea flavor.

The different kinds of tea preparation throughout India—though mainly in the north—depend very much where you go and on who makes it. A cup usually consists of black tea leaves boiled in water, with varying amounts of milk and sweetness added. Sometimes people will add a spice along with the tea, like cinnamon, cardamom, or cloves, but regular chai is generally different from the slightly-more-expensive masala chai, which has a blend of spices (masalas) mixed into it. That’s what most cafes in America refer to as “chai.”

Different regions prepare tea slightly differently, though. In rural parts of Himachal Pradesh that I have visited, for example, many people drink their tea milky with lots of sugar. But living in Himachal Pradesh, I have only experienced a small fraction of India’s tea culture. In other parts of the country, such as West Bengal (famous for its high-quality tea, notably from Darjeeling), many people drink it with no milk or sugar at all—that’s according to my co-fellow Aliya, whose family is Bengali. Wherever you go, people in different regions have their own recipes—and preferences—for their tea.

Although tea-drinking in many parts of contemporary India is a normal part of life, it is actually not an ancient tradition in the country. The tea plant is native to China, where people have been drinking it for over 2,000 years. (As an interesting side note, the respective etymologies of the words “tea” and “chai” likely correlate with its trade routes throughout history). It has only been within less than 200 years that Indian tea has been cultivated and consumed on a mass level.

My cup of tea during a field visit in early April. I liked these tea cups so much I found a similar set for my own house soon after.

A 2018 article in The Hindu explains that the cultivation and consumption of tea in India can be directly linked to with European colonization, starting when 17th-and 18th-century aristocrats in Britain developed a fondness for Chinese tea. Because tea imported from China was expensive, and because British colonists wanted to compete with Dutch traders (and to grow another cash crop in colonial India besides opium), a Scottish horticulturist in the mid-1800s stole several tea plants and seeds from China and smuggled them into British India. Those seedlings, as well as some that had been found in Northeastern India, eventually helped develop major tea plantations in India, and the colonists built an industry around the cultivation and distribution of Indian tea to Britain and other parts of the world. By the late 1800s, Britain was consuming more tea from India than from China.

While the British extracted lots of tea (and many other resources) from India during their rule, Indians also began drinking tea themselves. Tea stalls cropped up at railway stations throughout North India, teas were advertised in local languages, and local vendors added more and more milk and sugar to the tea they sold. After India’s independence in 1947, the tea culture remained, though it had developed its own distinct identity.

Today, India consumes most of the tea that it produces. The Indian government’s tea board reports that 80 percent of the tea grown in India is consumed by the domestic population. India is also ranked as the second-largest producer of tea in the world, and many brands, both Indian and international, sell it in domestic and international markets. You can buy tea in pretty much any grocery store, and I haven’t been to any cafe, dhaba or restaurant that doesn’t sell it. India’s tea is now much more Indian than British-- even though it never actually was British.

Jagori’s tea urn, where all the employees take tea twice a day.

For me, it has taken a while to get used to the ubiquity of chai in India. I grew up drinking coffee, and I still like to drink espresso drinks when I can--you can buy them at certain cafes around Dharamshala. I know that as a foreigner, I can’t fully understand or explain chai’s significance—not only as a cultural symbol but also as something to associate with home. Despite that, my tea consumption while living here has still far outpaced that of coffee. On a normal day, I consume 2-3 cups of chai, but some days the count has surpassed 5. My favorite part of Indian chai is its simplicity—black tea, milk, and sugar in a small cup—an uncomplicated yet indisputable comfort wherever you are. And like so many things in India that appear simple on the outside but actually have complex stories behind them, chai has become an integral part of my experience as a Shansi fellow. So if I order a “chai tea latte” in the U.S. when I return, I won’t even try to compare it with what I’ve had here. And by that point, I hope it will just be easier (and cheaper) to try to make chai myself--or better yet, to come back to India and drink even more.