Economy is ecology is community

This has been the hottest week so far this year in our city. Fortunately, we aren’t there—we’re in Darjeeling, one of India’s colonial-era hill stations perched on a steep slope in West Bengal, within sight of the snow-capped Himalayas. Our room has a view of the third largest peak in the world, if there aren’t clouds in the way. Unfortunately, since we arrived there have been clouds in the way. Or to be more precise, we’ve been inside a cloud much of the time: a thick, mysterious soup of white that smudges the hills as it rolls in, gently drains their color, and eventually obliterates them from view.Still, the vivid green of the nearby hillsides, the majestic trees lifting into the clouds, and the cool weather have been beautiful. Arriving in the temperate calm after sweating for more than 24 hours on a loud, crowded train across the burning, desolate plains right up to the foot of the hills felt like a fever finally breaking. We’re enjoying the simple pleasures of wandering down Darjeeling’s narrow, sloped alleyways in our sweaters(!), and searching among the tall, stacked buildings for cafes to enjoy baked goods, American breakfast, Tibetan dumplings, real coffee, and local Darjeeling tea.

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photo credit: google images. This is what we saw but we didn’t have our camera in hand!
The tea is what made Darjeeling famous. If you’ve ever had English breakfast tea, then you’ve likely tasted it; it’s exported around the world. Darjeeling was founded in the nineteenth century as a strategic outpost for the British, who created large tea estates on the surrounding hillsides. These plantations were extremely profitable—for the owners, that is. The local Nepali and tribal people who actually produce the tea, plucking it leaf by leaf in the fields, don’t see much of the money that consumers around the world pay for this luxury good. The British occupation is now a thing of the past, but the tea plantations continue, and most are still owned by wealthy foreigners or at least by outsiders to the region.

As we sip our steaming brews, we’ve been reading essays by Wendell Berry, mulling over our trip to a small village in Uttar Pradesh, our daily life in an urban slum, and now visiting this heartland of Indian tea production. The words of this 79-year-old Kentucky farmer have given us pause for reflection:

“Common sense tells us—and our experience shows us—that economy and ecology are ultimately the same, just as economy and community are ultimately the same; ultimately, people cannot expect to prosper by doing damage to the land and to human communities.” (p. 82, Citizenship Papers by Wendell Berry)

We visited a tea estate one morning, following a winding dirt path down through waves of green bushes spreading away into the morning mist, to the small factory building in the middle. The whole wood-paneled building smells like a tea chest, having soaked in years of fragrant tea leaves—four harvests per year, each one different in flavor and quality based on the unique conditions in which it grew. In fact, our tour guide told us, no two days of picked tea leaves will produce exactly the same tea; they have been plucked and dried and processed in different temperatures and humidity, and they have come from different sections of the tea garden, each with slightly different soil and elevation. What we realized as we toured the small factory, is that producing tea is not a man-made process. It is a collaborative effort between humans and nature in which even human expertise can only influence the natural growth and oxidation process that is already in motion. Producing high quality tea is an art form in which you can’t completely control the outcome, because your partners are the rain, the soil, the weather, and the enzymes in the leaves.

We learned that this particular estate, Happy Valley, has recently gone organic, adhering to “biodynamic” approaches to modern agriculture which use natural processes and materials in a scientific way to ensure that soil stays fertile, water is conserved, and yields are high. This seems like a positive long-term investment in this beautiful and profitable landscape, and in the livelihood of the people who depend on it. Economy is ecology is community.

We also learned that the estate produces “fair trade” tea, but were surprised to learn what that meant. The people who pick the tea are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the laborers who originally picked tea for the British when the estates were established. These hillsides are their ancestral homeland, and they have depended on this land for their survival for more than a hundred years, yet they do not own the land or the factory. They receive lower wages than the day laborers in our city who line up on the side of the road each day waiting to be hired for manual jobs like construction: 90-110 rupees ($1.50-$2 USD) compared with the 200-250 rupees ($3.50-$4.25 USD) that a day laborer would make. Our tour guide told us that they have the power to strike and stop production in order to force out a boss who breaks his promises and pays them less than previously agreed, but that when that owner sells out and leaves he is always replaced by another wealthy boss from outside who assumes ownership of the whole operation again. The current owner is a foreigner, and Happy Valley is only one of eleven tea estates owned by this man (there are only 84 tea estates in the Darjeeling area).

Most of the tea estates in the Darjeeling area are neither organic nor fair trade, but all of the tea is either exported or sold domestically at a lucrative price. The price of tea from this particular estate is made even higher by the fair trade label, but these profits are not reflected directly in the tea pickers’ wages. What the “fair trade” label does ensure is that out of those profits, a certain percentage is given back to the workers in the form of benefits like medical care, school fees for the workers’ children, and houses on the edge of the tea estate which they own outright, instead of renting. We haven’t had the chance to talk with the tea pickers directly, so we have no firsthand insight into how they feel about this arrangement—perhaps it works well. Undeniably, education, housing, and medical care are a good thing. But we couldn’t help wondering whether workers might prefer to have the option of cash in hand to spend their wages however they decide is best instead of having so much of it converted into benefits for them after tea is sold? And is it fair that the bulk of the profit from this famous, local product should go to a wealthy outsider who has no hand in the growing, harvesting, or production process instead of to the local people who live and work on the land?

We couldn’t help but wonder whether getting paid in welfare benefits rather than cash makes the workers more dependent on the tea estate. Could it be that people with cash in hand might use their increased range of options to opt for something other than a life of picking tea? Or that they might even opt to buy the land and the factory themselves, taking control of their own natural resources and economy? Maybe. Maybe not. We’re just outsiders passing through, so we don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to say one way or the other.

Even with our limited insight, however, visiting this tea estate felt significant because gave us the rare opportunity to visit the place of origin of a product we usually consume without any sense of that product’s history; with complete ignorance of the positive and negative ways that people and places have been impacted by the process of bringing it into being. We, like most people in the world, are “living on the far side of a broken connection… fed, clothed, and sheltered from sources, in nature and in the work of other people, toward which [we] feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility” (p. 48, Citizenship Papers). Visiting the estate reminded us that we are connected to those people and places, for better or worse, and that there are complex realities we don’t usually think about when we brew a pot of tea. The same is true for putting on a shirt, or buying a bag of chips, or eating a piece of fruit that has come to us from halfway around the world.

Wendell Berry points out that we often think about economic activity only in terms of “profitability and utility”, which means that we go about our work and our consumption in this global economy without asking the basic questions which are crucial to understanding what is really going on: “Is the worker diminished or in any way abused by this work? What is the effect of the work upon the place, its ecosystem, its watershed, its atmosphere, its community? What is the effect of the product upon its user, and upon the place whee it is used?” (p.38) The answers to these questions tell us more about what is really helpful or productive than a strictly financial analysis ever could.

As that wise old Kentuckian would say, you can’t ensure the health of an economy without taking care of the people and the land it depends on. Seeing behind the grocery store aisle to the tea garden has, in this case, reminded us of the land and people we depend on, and made us interested in learning more about this vast web of connections so that we can respect the people and places with which we are linked.

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A tea plucker at Happy Valley (photo credit: google images)

 

Back to the Land

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A baby water buffalo with full-grown ears!

 

This past week we had the privilege of visiting A.’s Indian colleague and his family in their village. This colleague is a very thoughtful community worker with a heart for the poor and a knack for building relationships and disarming people with his gentle demeanor. It’s not unusual for him to begin his workday in the wee hours of the morning helping his father to harvest a field of their crops before commuting into the city to meet up with A. for work, so our friend’s life is still very much rooted in the village and it was nice to see more of that side of his life. It was nice to get away from the noise and the crowds of the city and reconnect with nature again. We slept on the roof under the stars, enjoyed seeing lots of beautiful birds (and even a wild fox!), and explored the fields and dirt roads with our friend.

It was amazing to see how in tune the villagers are to nature, and how knowledgeable and creative they are about making use of the natural world. Our first morning there, he taught us how to harvest our toothbrushes and toothpaste directly from the tree: we broke off small twigs from a neem tree and used the frayed ends to scrub our teeth, just like the locals. We have seen neighbors doing this before, even in the city, but had never tried it ourselves. Surprisingly, this neem stick method really seemed to get the job done! But there’s a reason you’ve never seen neem-flavored toothpaste in stores—it’s incredibly bitter.

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Our ideal homestead.

 

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The ornately carved wooden doorway of our friend’s ancestral home. The house is over one hundred years old!

 

People were very laid-back and friendly. Our host addressed everyone we met as “Uncle” or “Grandma” or some other relative. Many of them are his blood relatives, but even the ones who aren’t have grown up alongside him or parented him nearly as much as they have their own children. When we visited his ancestral house, three of his uncles had tea with us and showed us around the inside courtyard. We were pleasantly surprised by how normally everyone treated us during our stay, because as foreigners we often attract a lot of attention. We eventually realized that most of the people we met didn’t know that we were foreigners!
These beautiful homes are made from mud, bamboo, and the dried branches of lentil bushes. They belong to families of so-called Dalits, or “Untouchables.” In the past, this part of the village probably would have been quite segregated from the rest of the community, and our host told us that even today the Dalits in his village remain landless and therefore earn their income by working in other people’s fields.

The injustice rooted in traditional customs around caste and gender makes up the shadow side of this otherwise peaceful, agrarian community. Our host says he knows of several “honor killings” that have been carried out in the village– murders of either young women or couples who have violated the sexual norms of the community or have chosen a relationship which their families disapproved of.

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A field of sunflowers being grown to sell.

 

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Wells and hand pumps like this one supply water to the village.

 

Our friend says that over the past 10-15 years, the climate of the area has been slowly changing. Right now, the fields are already unusually dry and he fears that monsoon may come late this year. Such fluctuations in weather can be disastrous for subsistence farmers like our friend’s family and neighbors who depend completely on the seasons and the land for their survival. Those who can no longer make ends meet on the farm will eventually end up living in slums in the city, so the problems of rural and urban India are deeply interconnected.
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The puri-making circle: these aunties are busily working away to make enough fried bread for the dozens of guests who are about to descend on the house!

 

The main events of our visit were related to the upcoming wedding of our friend’s younger brother: a puja, or worship ceremony, followed by the Tilak, another ritual (between the groom and the brother of the bride) during which the bride’s family brings gifts to the groom’s family, who then hosts them for a feast in which both extended families celebrate the impending marriage.
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The Brahmin priest, or Pandit, presides over the puja for the groom.

 

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The groom’s parents (foreground) and the pandit (center) make preparations before the Tilak.

 

The ceremonies were interesting to watch, but having the house crowded with more than two-hundred guests made the second day significantly less restful than the first! In the villages, there is only electricity for a few hours each day–much worse than the power cuts we get in the slum. In this case, those hours were approximately 9 p.m.-6 a.m., with a few sporadic moments throughout the day. Temperatures were well above 100 degrees fahrenheit, but body heat certainly pushed them even higher inside the house!

It was fascinating to experience a slice of rural Indian life. The village is really the heart of the city, since nearly everyone is a recent migrant from the countryside. Seeing the rhythms of family and work life in the village sheds light on our neighbors’ approach to life in the slum, and gives us a greater appreciation for their previous life experiences. However, meeting so many people and having no control over when we eat, sleep, or do anything else over an extended period of time can also be a stressful experience, so we were just as thankful to return to the familiarity of the city afterward!