The Dooars Tea Estates: CTC, Gardens and Garden Lines

A landscape made by tea

Drive east from Sevoke and within half an hour the Dooars turn into an ocean of clipped green bushes, waist-high and flat-topped, under tall shade trees planted in rows. Garden follows garden for more than 150 km, broken by rivers, forest and the towns that grew around them: Malbazar, Chalsa, Nagrakata, Banarhat, Birpara, Hasimara, Kalchini. Many of these towns carry the names of the gardens they served, and the railway that links them was built to carry tea.

The first Dooars garden opened at Gazaldoba in 1874, nine years after the British annexed the region from Bhutan. Planters leased forest land along the foothills, cleared it and planted tea, and within a few decades the gardens ran the length of the region. Today the Dooars and the Terai below Darjeeling produce a large share of India's tea, most of it sold at auction in Siliguri and Kolkata and drunk as chai across the country.

CTC: the tea in your chai

Darjeeling's hill gardens make orthodox tea: whole leaves rolled and dried slowly to keep their delicate flavour. The Dooars gardens, on hot, wet plains, mostly make CTC, which stands for crush, tear, curl. After withering, the green leaf goes through rollers with sharp teeth that cut it into small pieces and roll them into tiny granules. Oxidation is quick, and the dried granules brew dark, strong and fast, which is exactly what you want for tea boiled with milk and sugar.

The difference explains why a kilo of Dooars CTC costs a fraction of a fine Darjeeling flush, and why the gardens here are larger, flatter and more mechanised than those in the hills.

The people who work the gardens

Clearing forest and plucking tea needed far more workers than the thinly populated plain could supply. From the late 19th century, recruiters known as sardars brought families from the Chota Nagpur plateau, in present-day Jharkhand and western Odisha: Oraon, Munda, Kharia, Santal and other Adivasi peoples. Nepali families came down from the hills. They lived in the labour lines of each garden, rows of small houses that became villages, and their common language, Sadri, is still spoken across the Dooars.

Plucking is mostly done by women, who pick two leaves and a bud by hand and carry the leaf in baskets or bags to weighing points. Men do much of the pruning, spraying and factory work. Under the Plantations Labour Act of 1951 gardens must provide housing, medical care and other benefits, but wages have long been among the lowest in organised work in West Bengal, and they are a constant subject of negotiation and protest.

Hard times have hit hard here. In the early 2000s several gardens closed when their owners abandoned them, and families in those gardens faced hunger. Many young people now leave for work in Kerala, Bengaluru and the Gulf. The festivals of the garden lines, especially Karam in the month of Bhadra, with drumming and dancing around branches of the karam tree, remain the strongest link with Chota Nagpur.

The plucking year

Tea bushes here rest in winter. From December to February gardens are pruned back to bare frames and plucking stops; the bushes look grey and the gardens quiet. With the first warmth and rain in March, new shoots appear and the first flush is plucked. Through the monsoon, from June to September, growth is fastest and plucking runs every week or so, with the largest crop of the year. Production tails off in October and November.

For visitors this means the gardens are greenest and busiest from April to October, which overlaps only partly with the safari season. March, April and October give you both: parks open and pluckers out on the slopes.

Visiting a garden: walks, factories and stays

The simplest way to see a tea garden is to walk its roads early in the morning. Around 7 am, pluckers walk out to the sections, supervisors check the day's work and the light under the shade trees is soft and green. Garden roads are working roads; walk on them, not between the bushes, and step aside for tractors.

Factories are not tourist attractions in the Dooars. A few gardens allow visits when asked politely through a manager or a homestay host, usually in the morning and not on busy days; most do not. Hygiene rules mean you may not be allowed beyond a viewing point. Never walk into a factory or into the labour lines without permission.

Some gardens have opened old managers' bungalows or garden houses to guests, and homestays in garden villages such as Samsing let you sleep among the bushes. Samsing, at about 900 m in the first hills above Chalsa, is the easiest place to combine tea and forest, with Rocky Island on the Murti and Suntalekhola nearby.

• Ask before photographing pluckers; many will agree, some will not, and both answers deserve respect.
• Do not pick leaves or walk through sections; bushes are pruned to a precise table height.
• Keep to garden roads, especially at dusk, when elephants and leopards move through the gardens.
• Buy local CTC from garden outlets or town shops rather than roadside stalls with unlabelled packets.

Gardens, forests and wild animals

Tea and forest are not separate worlds in the Dooars. The gardens lie between Gorumara, Chapramari, Jaldapara, Chilapata and Buxa, and wild animals use them as passages from one forest to the next. Elephant herds cross garden sections at night, sometimes raiding the labour lines for rice and handia. Leopards live in the dense, shaded rows of tea bushes, which give them cover and a supply of dogs, goats and rats, and encounters with pluckers are reported almost every year. Gaur graze at garden edges near the forests.

For a visitor this has two sides. A dawn drive along garden roads near Chalsa or Binnaguri can give you elephants or gaur without a safari ticket. And it is why garden people are careful at dusk, why drains and thick sections are avoided after dark, and why you should take local advice seriously when your host says not to walk somewhere.

Where to see the gardens

Good stretches for garden roads and views lie along the Sevoke–Malbazar–Chalsa road, where the hills rise behind the gardens; around Chalsa and Metali on the way up to Samsing; on the road from Nagrakata to Banarhat; and around Birpara and Hasimara on the way to Jaldapara. The Dooars line train runs through gardens for long stretches between Oodlabari and Hasimara; take a day train and sit on the north side.

Small tea growers are part of the picture now. Since the 1990s thousands of farmers around Jalpaiguri, Malbazar and Siliguri have planted tea on their own fields and sell green leaf to factories that buy it in. These smallholdings look different from the big estates, with bushes running right up to village houses.