[This was a column I wrote in the Telegraph of 25 March 2008 after an enchanting trip to a tea garden in the hills of South India in 2001.]
WHAT THE BRITISH LEFT BEHIND
I have been to paradise – well, as close to it as I am likely to get this side of the earth. It was a 100-years-old bungalow called Stanmore in a tea garden off Valparai, some 50 miles west of and 4000 feet above Coimbatore. It is a 10,000-sq-ft single-story building with just three enormous bedrooms, a drawing room with ancient novels, and a dining room. A long verandah runs along one side where I spent most of the time, reading or surveying the green carpet of tea bushes spread over the surrounding hills as far as I could see. This is not the picking season, so for hours I saw no one at all. Apart from a station wagon maybe twice in a day, there were no vehicles in sight at all. So everything I hate about modern India – the traffic, the cacophony, the crowds, the chaotic energy – was banished. When Ranga’s dishes incited overeating, I could go for a walk down to a stream in the valley below and back up again; it took two hours. If I was too lazy, I just sprawled on a bench under a tree and read.
I must admit to a weakness for bungalows. They were standard housing for the well-to-do in my childhood. The tall hall in the centre was cooled by currents rising and going out of the skylights, which also let in light. There was a verandah in front, from which one entered the hall; the back also generally had a verandah. Bedrooms were attached to the two sides of the hall. The dining room was usually at the back, often in the verandah. Beyond the back was an outhouse which housed the kitchen, pantry and the stables, or in later times, the garage.
But Stanmore was different. It was not meant for a district collector, but for a tea estate manager, who did not expect to receive a large number of people. So he did not need a large hall. It was quite small; it had a cosy drawing room on one side, and a dining room on the other. Then a passage led down to three bedrooms. Unlike an official bungalow, where the hall is the centrepiece, Stanmore had none; it devoted most of the space to the bedrooms. Each would be about 1200 square feet. Half of it would be the bedroom itself, a quarter would be a bathroom, and a quarter a dressing room. People a hundred years ago wore cottons; and the British had a lot of clothes. So they needed plenty of wardrobe space. Everyone wore hats, so there were hatstands in strategic places. I saw some other bungalows belonging to the group as well. One had jacarandas showering flowers in front; another had a bignonia venesta laden with orange flowers. If I had had the time, I would have tried out a number of bungalows.
Well, I did try out another bungalow some weeks ago; it is in Matheran, some 50 miles from Bombay in the Sahyadris. It is called the Verandah in the Forest; at one time it was known as Dubash bungalow. I cannot say whether this was the Ardeshir Dubash who made it rich in World War I from stevedoring, or the Nariman Dubash who sold the plot to Shah Rukh Khan where he lives now, or the Homai Dubash who was with me in college, or another one. But the Verandah is a two-story construction. The ground floor has three or four bedrooms. But it is the upper floor which is its glory. It has one long hall, with skylights, which is divided into half a dozen big suites with a drawing room in the centre and a dining room behind it. All open out on a vast, 25-feet-wide verandah in the front. It has beautiful colonial armchairs whose arms can be stretched out and brought together in front; one can put one’s feet up on the chair’s arms and doze off. If it is warm, one can withdraw to the back of the verandah; if it is cold, one can sit at the edge and sun oneself.
But going back to Stanmore, it is difficult to imagine today what an ambitious feat tea gardens were. For on the way to it, one passes through forests which are pretty impenetrable; all one finds in them even now is elephants, bison and langurs. The hills that grow tea today must all have been covered with such forest once. They must have been cleared with axes and machetes by armies of men. Food for them must have been brought on ponies. The British made a massive investment in the tea gardens, and in the process changed the landscape unrecognizably. A politically correct environmentalist would shudder at the thought, but I do not mind the sacrilege. I think the tea gardens look lovely; I would take a holiday in them any day.
Indian tea gardens are no longer profitable. They have largely lost the international market to newer competitors – Kenya, Indonesia and Vietnam. And the domestic market does not have much taste for quality; it mostly consumes tea dust, the cheaper the better. Most tea gardens have a resident labour force. Minimum wage legislation has made it expensive, especially in West Bengal. The workers have children for whom they would like to have jobs; but the tea gardens cannot employ more.
The gardens in Tamil Nadu have a different problem. Industry is booming in Tamil Nadu, which is experiencing labour shortage. There is so much employment in the textile factories of Coimbatore and Tiruppur that they have drained surrounding areas of labour. As one drives out of these cities, it is difficult to find a rice field any more; vast tracts have been put down to coconut because it needs less labour. And labour has been getting scarcer in Valparai as well.
It is these rising costs that are compelling tea estate managers like the Woodbriar Group to explore conversion of tea bungalows to tourism. I am all for it. But I did think that managers’ bungalows were not enough to turn tea estates into profitable tourist resorts. The tourist density would have to increase.
That in itself would not be a problem, since the current density is so low. But estate owners would have to keep two things in mind. One is unity of architecture. Our hill and forest areas are being ruined by ugly, storied houses built by hungry hoteliers. If the tea estates built such houses, they would ruin the ambience of the estates. They would be well advised to stick to low-rise bungalows, which blend so well with the landscape. And second, they should site new bungalows so as to preserve the ambience. This is not difficult. But it is important to realize that the attraction of tea gardens lies in the way they have refashioned nature; the less signs they show of the human hand, the more successful they will be in attracting human tourists. I look forward to the spreading of a new tea culture which would enable us to get away from the madding crowd, and to recapture a century-old way of life.
