fulfill the agricultural potential of the wild jungles of Assam.
Sigmond emphasizes that Indian-grown tea was not a poor substitute for the more exotic teas of China that had previously filled English tea caddies. He quotes the Agricultural Society of Calcutta, which declared that a discovery had taken place and pronounced it to be “one of a most interesting and important nature, as connected with the commercial and agricultural interests of this empire. We allude to the existence of the real and genuine tea-plant of China, indigenous within the Honourable Company’s dominions in Upper Assam. This shrub is no longer to be looked upon as a plant of doubtful introduction. It exists, already planted by the hand of Nature, through a vast extent of territory in Upper Assam” (68–69). As this passage reveals, previous attempts had been made to introduce Chinese tea seeds and seedlings into the East India Company’s territories in northern India. The discovery of the “real and genuine tea-plant of China” growing natively in Indian soil, according to the society and to Sigmond, would revolutionize the embryonic tea industry of British India. Rather than attempting to artificially create substitutes for the more desirable Chinese tea, British tea planters could cultivate the native resources of India to produce an imperial source of the national beverage. According to Sigmond, Assam tea “has a delicate and agreeable smell; it makes a very pleasant infusion, of a deeper colour than ordinary Souchong; it has every quality that belongs to a good, sound, unadulterated tea. There cannot be the slightest doubt of its being the genuine produce of the real tea-plant” (78). The identity of Indian tea plants as “genuine” would resonate with tea drinkers who had relied on tea imported from China for comfort, nourishment, and a foundation for social relationships for two centuries.40
In celebrating the potential for British-controlled, Indian-grown, genuine tea, Sigmond employs a rhetoric of discovery. He focuses on the fact that the tea found growing in India was planted “by the hand of Nature” rather than by the hands of British planters.41 According to this rhetoric, the tea plant grew wild in the jungles of Assam before the arrival of British colonists, awaiting the moment when East India Company explorers uncovered its existence as an imperial source for tea. The definition of “discovery” assumes the prior existence of the item, as it is dis-covered, uncovered, and revealed to the gaze of the discoverer, who plays a relatively passive role in the process. “Discovery” implies that the one doing the discovering did not actively create, produce, or manufacture the discovery; instead, he or she makes something visible that had been hidden, removing the intervening obstruction to reveal that the item being discovered had actually existed all along. Discovering tea, the national beverage of Great Britain, growing natively on Indian soil suggests that Nature authorized British expansion into that region, affirming the natural right and responsibility of a “paternal government,” as Sigmond puts it, to rule Indian territories and to reap the benefits of Indian resources. The tea industry had already proved profitable to the British government through the monopoly of the East India Company; finding tea growing wild in the company’s territories in India just when its China monopoly was dissolved appeared to be divine intervention, providing both the company and the nation with a new source of tea.
Even more fundamentally, the discovery of tea, a beverage that had become part of the fabric of daily life in England, growing wild within the jungles of India proved that India was indeed destined to become a great asset to the British Empire. Finding tea, planted by the hand of Nature and thus approved of by cosmological forces, within the territories of India suggested that India had, in some sense, always been British. The expansion of British rule and agriculture merely actualized the latent Britishness of India, symbolized by the presence of the authentic tea plant, planted by the hand of Nature and hidden by the dense jungle until the British were ready to nurture it into commercial profitability. The historical preexistence of the tea plant in India, which predated British exploration and colonization, suggests a logical syllogism that helped to naturalize the process of imperial expansion and provided explicit justification, for Sigmond, of British rule in India. If to be British included the choice of tea as a beverage and as an item of commerce, and if India revealed itself as a natural source of indigenous, genuine tea, then India must have been predestined to become part of the British Empire, an empire that depended on the circulation and the consumption of tea.
At the same time, discovering authentic Chinese tea growing wild within the bounds of the British Empire removed any lingering anxieties of basing national identity on a product imported from foreign sources—essentially domesticating the particularly troubling exotic origins of the national beverage. Finding tea in India affirmed the connection between drinking tea and English national identity, while also ensuring a secure, domestic source for the beverage that had become crucial to nineteenth-century culture and society. Sigmond suggests that tea really was fundamentally English; the fact that tea had been cultivated and produced beyond national borders could only be viewed as a temporary aberrance in the history of tea drinking in England. The discovery of “real” tea growing within the East India Company’s territory in India manifestly corrected this mistake, restoring tea, from bud to leaf to teapot, to British hands. With British supervision of all stages of the cultivation, production, and shipment of Indian-grown tea, English consumers could rest assured that the beverage filling their teacups was authentic, genuine, and pure.
According to Sigmond, the discovery of the tea plant in India accomplished dual goals. First, the new tea industry in India provided the British government with a profitable addition to its financial and territorial empire. Sigmond quotes from “the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal,” which avers, “Assam may yet be found to be one of the most valuable acquisitions to the British Empire” (80). The discovery of the tea plant in Assam led to the annexation of that region as part of the Indian territories under British rule, significantly expanding the British Empire. At the same time, the revelation that the tea plant grew natively within India ensured that the English taste for tea could be satisfied domestically, from within that empire. Sigmond proudly proclaims that the nation could rely on Assam tea production to replace the China tea trade: “[T]here can be no doubt that an ample supply for European consumption can be obtained [in Upper Assam]” (81). Charles Bruce, whose report includes his firsthand account of surveying the tea tracts of Assam, reports areas of wild tea so large that he “did not see the end of it,” suggesting the vast, unending profits available in those unexplored jungles (127), and he confidently asserts, “I feel convinced the whole of the country is full of tea” (128). Far from relying on the uncertainties of foreign merchants and the mysteries of Chinese tea manufacture, as Sigmond and Bruce suggest, England—through imperial expansion—could at last take on the responsibility of supplying its own citizens with the national beverage. Rather than remaining dependent upon China, England became indebted to the tea plant, a commodity crucial to English culture and identity, and, henceforward, to the expansion of the British Empire.
Arthur Reade’s 1884 treatise also embraces the benefits of bringing the tea industry into the British sphere of influence. While his rhetoric encourages tea drinkers to consume the commodities of the world as a global endeavor, Reade nevertheless agrees that the cultivation of Indian tea would permanently solve the threat to English identity posed by Chinese tea:
The tea plant, although cultivated in various parts of the East, is probably indigenous to China; but is now grown extensively in India. In consequence of the poorness of the quality of the tea imported by the East India Company, and the necessity of avoiding an entire dependence upon China, the Bengal Government appointed in 1834 a committee for the purpose of submitting a plan for the introduction and cultivation of the tea-plant; and a visit to the frontier station of Upper Assam ended in a determination on the part of Government to cultivate tea in that region. In 1840 the “Assam Company” was formed, and it is claimed for them that they possess the largest tea plantation in the world. . . . Every year thousands of acres are being brought under cultivation, and in a short time it seems likely that we shall be independent of China for our supplies of tea. (19–20)
According to Reade, British consumption of Chinese tea formed the basis of commercial and political dependency, a relationship that weakened Britain’s international position. He emphasizes the need to avoid “an entire dependence upon
