The why of chai

How an occupied people created the spiced brew, and an herb-tinged recipe from the new League of Kitchens cookbook.

Photos courtesy of the League of Kitchens Cookbook, shot by Kristin Teig

A brief history of masala chai

Tea is only native to a small corner of India, and with the exception of some tribal practices, there’s virtually no documented evidence of steeping tea leaves for drinking until the British empire established its plantations in Assam. So how did India become a nation of chai drinkers? While chai may have emerged from British imperial pressure on the population, it didn’t go the way the regime wanted.

Indian tea took off in the wake of Britain’s Opium Wars with China. The British wanted tea and China held an effective monopoly on the supply. China’s emperors only accepted payment for tea in silver, and when the crown’s treasury started to run dry, British smugglers began peddling opium to Chinese buyers. A newly addicted populace paid for the drug in silver, Britain had a refreshed supply of silver to pay for tea, and this drug trade continued apace until the spring of 1839, when the Chinese government set fire to some 20,000 chests of opium in the port of Canton. Queue two wars that changed the balance of power between Eastern and Western nations, and Britain retained its insatiable thirst for tea.

The empire’s solution was to grow their own tea in new territorial holdings in Assam, where a native variety of the tea plant had been observed. Colonizers established vast plantations on the backs of conscripted Indian labor. A whole system was born for making tea that was reminiscent of Chinese methods, but on a larger scale at lower quality. Soon, British demand for tea couldn’t keep up with the growing supply, so planters returned to a tried and tested maneuver: get the locals hooked on the stuff.

A cup of orthodoxy

A British planters’ group called the Indian Tea Association launched a marketing campaign like no other. It offered free tea at public buildings, squares, and events. It set up street vendors with tea to sell cheap cups to Indian buyers. The Association taught Indians how to drink it in the English style, with milk and sugar. Such a move wasn’t just about pushing product, but ideas. By bringing English style tea into Indian streets and homes, the empire sought to conquer the tastes of the Indian people as well as their economy.

While foreign customers enjoyed premium whole-leaf Indian tea, Indians were apportioned the lower grade broken leaf varieties. These tiny particles brew dark, strong, and bitter, without much nuance. In order to make the tea more palatable, some chaiwallahs began steeping spices like cinnamon and cardamom in their pots. It is likely that they borrowed aspects of this practice from Ayurvedic medicinal remedies, which often involve decoctions of fragrant spices. The Tea Association disapproved because members thought that additions of spices cut down on the amount of tea leaves consumed, and remember, the whole point of this endeavor is to eat up supply created by the violent appropriation of Indian land into tea fields. “Adding the spices was really an act of rebellion against the British,” Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of the Diaspora Co. spice company, told the writer Leena Trivedi-Grenier in a story for Epicurious that I had the pleasure to edit.

I don’t know enough of the history to take that claim at face value or not, but I do believe that empires are fragile machines. Extracting resources from an oppressed people isn’t enough to keep them running. So what they can’t achieve by force, they attempt to secure with propaganda. Indians drinking masala chai didn’t stop the British imperial machine. But they did, in a small way, subvert one of the machine’s psychological goals. Not a bad place to start.

Yamini Joshi’s masala chai

Today, masala chai is mostly made in the north of India. Southerners are more likely to take their chai with milk and tea leaves alone. Most of the chai I’ve drank in India has been made with the same kind of broken leaf grades used two centuries ago. You need that strength to stand up to simmering with milk and sugar, whether you use spices in your brew or not. So when it comes to making chai, I prefer to use the cheap stuff. Save the whole leaf tea for brewing plain.

For paid subscribers, I want to share an alluring chai recipe from Yamini Joshi, a cooking instructor with the League of Kitchens who was born in Mumbai and now lives in Queens. The League of Kitchens offers in-person and online cooking classes taught by aunties who’ve immigrated to the US from all over the world, and I can’t recommend them enough. They have a new cookbook out today full of dishes from their instructors that’s well worth a look. I spoke to Yamini about how she makes her unusual herb-inflected chai, below.