A Nice Cup of Tea
by George Orwell
Evening Standard, 12 January 1946

Read the original that has the B.B.C. honoring him as the King of Indian tea.

All honor goes out to the Victorian Era woman who sculpted the tea world of Darjeeling today. Those strange times between The scepter of the Queen and the thunder and lightening of Shiva.

by Usha Bande

excerpt:

Spectrum, India Tribune

In colonial India, calendar art was not an indigenous popular art form but a hybrid style produced for British patrons and the Anglicised Indian elite. It denoted the westernisation of taste of the bourgeois Indians and the modification of a foreign medium to suit the Indian style. The credit for popularising calendar art and taking his paintings to the masses goes to Ravi Varma (1848-1906), the painter-artist from the royal household of the Travancore state of Kerala. An artist par excellence, Ravi Varma was the first Indian painter to master the technique of western oil painting. He also set up one of the earliest lithographic presses in India. These presses reproduced Varma’s mythological paintings by the thousands. These reproductions reached Indian homes across the vast span of the land but at a massive cost to his art.

Some of the early calendars demonstrate his graceful portraits of goddess Lakshmi, the lithe Shakuntala, the beautiful Damayanti and the harassed Sahirhandri hiding her eyes from the gaze of Keechak. But unfortunately, the paintings became the objects of the erotic gaze and his art became synonymous with kitsch. During the freedom struggle, the common motifs were of mother India and the traditionally accepted mother-son duo of Yashoda-Krishna.

Calendar representation has undergone rapid change over the years. It is now a popular art form as well as an advertising medium of sorts. Apart from religious icons and mythological figures, new and more patriotic and secular themes are displayed on calendars. Large establishments like banks, insurance corporations, big corporate houses and airways, and even central and state governments have entered the field. Though religious themes are still in popular demand, depictions of Indian textiles, folk arts and crafts, and places of tourist interest are also gaining ground.

During the 60s, popular calendar displays pertained to the slogan Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. Pictures of farmers and lush green fields formed the foreground or there was the Army in action with Patton tanks in the backdrop. Portrayals of dams and some industrial establishments and other sites of progress were also trendy. The secular topics present themes of unity and the equality of all religions. To emphasise this theme, some calendars portray men and women wearing different state costumes or people with different religious affiliations standing within a map of India with a lamp burning in the middle. The lamp is symbolic and may well refer to Cardinal Newman’s famous poem, so liked by Gandhiji, “Lead Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom.”

 

Tea Paparazzi have spotted however the itinerant native wild elephant neighbors bootlegging for grog and beer.

 

More than a few of the powerful “Pachyderms” roaming wild have been known to go carousing for spiritual journey of their own where they nose about in hot pursuit of purely what I call “Darjeeling Moonshine” They litterally throw their wieght around like wild pirates, barging in here and there right through walls and drink up the tea garden workers home made basmati sake or beer. Giving new meaning to being a “nose” in the tea business! I hope they are over 21!

Apparently they are just crazy for Tea Garden basmati sake and they wantonly wander in search of the pure spirits! I wonder if salubrious elephants chant about Ganesh slurping sake! The carousing of these wild elephants can cost Tea Estate owners millions of rupees in tea garden insurance to protect and insure the peace of mind for tea garden work forces. It is hard not to giggle. The Darjeeling Tea Lady will be providing surprising and delicous local recipes such as “mo mo’s” Nepalese spicy dumplings and perhaps some basmatic spirits surely they delight and sing tea songs after a long week of tea plucking!

Wild rolling boulders not stones… Sloshed elephants actually are quite a serious disorderly bunch. In other parts of India they can cause quite a traffic jam. How do you give an elephant a DUI when he takes a nap right in the middle of traffic?

Oh what tales the modern day “Mowgli” of Rudyard Kipling would see. To give a gander to the rolling emerald tea fields of green leaves. Dont get me started on the tale of the girl raised by wild elephants…. Apparently she might just have thrown Jane and Tarzan quite a Bombay gin! A film showing here in a local deli featuring Banglore T.V. Simply a true story above shared with me of real life tale of my beloved caravan carriers of the Raj and Rajini elephants.

The bigger the elephant the bigger the insurance Tea Garden owners much pay to protect the tea ladies from drunk as a skunk and elephant trunk!

Better they should seek peace and enligtenment drinking fresh tea.