The Darjeeling Distinction by Sarah Besky

Author:Sarah Besky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520277380
Publisher: University of California Press

LINKING PLANTATION AGRICULTURE TO CONSUMER-DRIVEN SOCIAL JUSTICE

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Keshav Roy began reinventing Windsor Tea Estate, drawing in equal measure on New Age spirituality and the language of luxury consumption. He did this one tourist, one television appearance, and one cocktail party at a time. Windsor was certified “organic” in 1988. At first, Mr. Roy received resentment and scorn from other plantation owners and managers for subverting the status quo of Darjeeling tea production. By the middle of the first decade of the new century, however, Windsor was the Darjeeling tea plantation most associated with fair trade, and Roy was routinely praised by fair-trade executives in the United States for his progressive social and environmental projects. Roy was among the first to appoint a female labor supervisor; he promoted the construction of biogas plants in Windsor’s villages; he instituted a permaculture project; and he even began a leopard-rehabilitation project in the jungles surrounding the plantation. Instead of being scorned and shunned, Roy became widely recognized for making Windsor ground zero for a flurry of international certifications in the district. Roy’s promotion of ecotourism, microloans, and other similar endeavors set an example for plantations across the district. Thanks in large part to Roy’s efforts, the language of environmental and social sustainability—like that of terroir and GI—came to permeate Darjeeling life. By the time I arrived in Darjeeling, nearly a quarter of the district’s plantations had been certified fair trade, a majority were certified organic, and several were pursuing Rainforest Alliance certification.

A discourse of transparency rests at the heart of fair trade. Fair-trade consumers believe that their purchases have the power to enact change in agricultural communities on the other side of the world.3 Tea plantations seeking certification thus face a critical challenge. To make the colonially derived production system appear redeemable by such consumers, Mr. Roy realized that he had to allow certifiers and foreign visitors to see the conditions of tea production. Windsor was among the first Darjeeling plantations where tourists could see tea processed in the factory, walk through the fields, and even stay the night. Mr. Roy’s tourism projects at Windsor are certainly exemplary of the garden-tourism dynamic I discussed in the previous chapter, but with an important twist: Mr. Roy placed himself, not workers, at the center of the plantation landscape. He styled himself as a benevolent, enlightened caretaker and environmental steward. While other plantations initially prohibited tourist access due to concerns about the dangerous terrain and personal safety (if not the moral and ethical misgivings the sight of plantation labor might induce), Windsor embraced it. Windsor is one of the few plantation factories on one of Darjeeling’s two main roads, and tour groups filter in and out daily. If they are lucky, they might have an audience with Mr. Roy himself, a captivating storyteller.

I followed these tours around the factory and tasting room to hear Mr. Roy wax to visitors about the “rhythms of nature,” what he called “terrestrial infirma” (an alluring

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