Mridula Chari: As it turns out, India owes its taste for tea and coffee to the diligent care of its former colonial overlords. Tea, particularly the Darjeeling kind, was introduced in plantations in North East India in the 1830s, as the British sought to destabilise the Chinese monopoly over the product. Tea plantations in India were initially meant to produce tea for foreign consumers. When tea consumption in Britain and the US began to stagnate around the turn of the 20th century, the British, ever the opportunists, decided to look to India to expand their markets. The only problem was that Indians were extremely reluctant consumers of the combination of sugar, boiled leaves, water and milk. In 1903, the British government established a propaganda unit, at first called the Tea Cess Committee, that was meant to propagate tea consumption. This board was funded by the proceeds of a tax on the export of tea. The government neatly renamed this as the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in 1937. Tea was so foreign to Indians – and for that matter Europeans – that the Tea Board’s early ads had to include instructions on how to brew the product. The board also distributed small packets of tea, available for one paisa, in villages and to middle-class consumers. The tea shops that exist at railways stations and docks today are a product of the Tea Board’s campaign, according to Vernon Wickizer in a book on the political economy of tea, coffee and colas. More here.