Almost two hundred years after Robert Bruce ‘discovered' tea in India for the British, tea has become the state drink of Assam.

According to some versions, Robert Bruce, while in Assam, heard of the plant from a ‘Singpho' chief. Specimens arrived a year later, when his brother Charles Allen Bruce was commandant at Sadiya near Dibrugarh.

India's first tea garden was at Sadiya. It has been contested that Lieutenant Charlton had proved the existence of tea earlier. But Charlton went to Assam after the first specimens of Assam tea arrived in Calcutta.

With C. A. Bruce learning of tea from his late brother, Robert Bruce became the official ‘ discoverer' of Indian tea. Accolades went to the surviving brother; everyone forgot the Singpho. Geography explains the history of India's North-East better; be it the similarities between Yunnan and the North-East as reason for wild tea in both places, or the fate of old Sadiya, destroyed by flood in 1952.

The Tinsukhia-Dibrugarh belt has produced a big portion of Assam's tea. In 2010, during a visit to Nampong, I enjoyed cups of tea in Dibrugarh. There wasn't any outlet celebrating the brew. And nothing to tell me what Assam tea is, to stoke my curiosity for it. Dibrugarh doesn't shout its importance in tea — it hosted the first plantation at Chabua, it is among the biggest tea-exporting towns of India, and its old estates feature in WW-II accounts. That's a lot of history.

What I sensed, instead, was the industrial side of tea.

Cutting-chai and readymade chai

Tea was everyday activity in Dibrugarh. But its misty story had weathered into backdrop. The present dominated. My request to visit the oldest plantation was denied. For the average visitor, curious of Assam's history in tea, the industry was colourless. I had expected ‘TEA' in capital letters and an ambience, even if touristy, linking my Indian love for tea to Assam. Or was I, as usual, seeing but not noticing?

Sticking to an old world charm, Mumbai's Tea Centre is a favoured haunt for many. And not far from there, roadside tea is neither less engaging nor bad. In the Himalayas, you drink black tea, lemon tea and ginger-lemon-honey tea; all from local tea shops and eateries, each one as busy as the next.

In Kerala, with newspaper and radio alongside, the local tea shop once meant Cold War and Gulf news with a warm, hypocritical cup in hand. Tea doesn't care how it is sold. That's what makes it national and everyone's brew. That's what made it the backdrop in Dibrugarh.

Later that month, I moved from Dibrugarh to Kolkata, the market end of tea-flows from the North East. There I found a local chain unconvincingly selling tea like cappuccino. The manager of another chain said it was challenging to sell tea fashionably when tea was already the national drink on the streets.

At Mumbai's public places, machine-vended tea isn't as popular as coffee, although good old ‘ cutting-chai' and readymade chai find takers. Unlike tea, which seems to represent life and its flaws, coffee is a lifestyle drink, at home in steadily upmarket cafes.Coffee doesn't mind inflation. With tea, it can invite revolution.

I wonder what tea gains by wearing the obvious crown of state or national drink. What difference does it make? Perhaps, instead of demanding a title, we should articulate tea's unsung quality of being actually national. Inclusive tea needs no crown.

(The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.)

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