If someone had told me a few months ago that there is a bit of Pakistan in the tea estates of Darjeeling in Eastern India, I would have laughed.

Granted, Muhammad Ali Jinnah met his second wife Maryam – then Rattanbai Petit – in this picturesque hill town. But, their romance had nothing to do with the tea gardens.

Also, granted that tea is a universal beverage, and Pakistan bought nearly 16,000 tonnes of it from India last year, shows data from J Thomas & Co., the world’s oldest tea auctioneers.

But I could still see no link; Darjeeling planters say Pakistani importers ignored their produce – labelled “the champagne of teas” and coveted across the globe from Japan to the US.

Namring tea estate on a misty morning in Darjeeling district in India. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya

“It is too expensive [for them],” someone had once educated me. But I do not know any Pakistani importer, and could not get their version.

Whatever be the reason, the fact is: Pakistan does not source tea from the Darjeeling hills.

A bit of Pakistan in the plantations, did someone say? Oh, I had reasons aplenty to be sceptical.

Coin Test

Now, I know better. There indeed is a bit of Pakistan in those hills, to be precise, a genuine Pakistani coin of 25 paisa value. It does not use the hackneyed “25 paisa”, but flaunts a prouder legend: “quarter rupee”.

And the coin, which is obviously very old, is valued dearly in the tea sampling room of a garden named Namring, the biggest in Darjeeling, manufacturing 300,000 kilograms of tea annually.

Mind you, the coin is valued not because of its antiquity, but something bizarre – it is used as a weight to measure small quantities of tea for tasting, and then arriving at an appropriate sale price.

Apparently, it weighs 2.5 grams, the exact amount of tea required for sampling.

The old Pakistani coin that is used as a standard weight for measuring 2.5 gm of tea for tasting purposes. This side shows the word “Pakistan”. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya

In March, the coin was used in a similar exercise that saw one single lot of 90 kg being adjudged Darjeeling’s “best” from Namring’s first flush – that is, the January-March period – when leaves are first harvested in a calendar year.

East India Co., the London trading firm that bought the lot, said it made its choice after sampling teas from the 87 gardens of Darjeeling, which are soon to be accorded the “Geographical Identification” certification under the European Union Law.

The lot from Namring was subsequently sold in the UK in sachets of 40 gm at £20 (or about 3,200 Pakistani rupees) and 80 gm at £35 (about 5,650 rupees).

The price worked out to a little over 70,000 Pakistani rupees a kilo, fetching East India Co. a cool 6.4 million rupees.

The same Pakistani quarter evaluates samples of the entire 300,000 kg of Namring’s output. And that is its value.

Tea pickers at work at the Namring tea estate in Darjeeling district in India on a misty morning. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya

Bags filled with freshly-plucked leaves being sent up the hillside to the factory for sorting at the Namring tea estate in Darjeeling in India. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya

Workers at the Namring factory unload bags of fresh tea leaves sent from the garden up the ropeway. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya

Private Practice

“Whoa, hold on there fella,” I can almost hear people say. “What is this gibberish about a Pakistani coin being used for weighing Indian teas? In fact, why use coins as a weight?”

I cannot blame the sceptics; it was exactly how I had reacted when I first saw a coin – an Indian 25 paisa from 1973 – being used for sampling at Goomtee, another Darjeeling plantation.

When I arrived at Goomtee, some Japanese buyers were sampling various blends; fastidious they may be, but even they had no issues with a coin being used for weighing samples.

Japanese buyers sampling various blends at the Goomtee tea estate in Darjeeling district in India. This plantation uses an old Indian 25-paisa coin to weigh tea before sampling. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya

I buttonholed B.N. Mudgal, the Goomtee General Manager, to demystify the quaint practice in an era of highly calibrated instruments. A veteran with 40 years in the business, if anybody could enlighten me, it had to be Mudgal.

In the event, even he could not throw any light. “I have no idea who started it,” he told me over a cup of Goomtee White, a variety that sells in the US at $35 (3,560 Pakistani rupees) for a 100-gm packet.

According to Mudgal, the practice had begun under British managers prior to 1947, and “institutionalised” by the time he joined the profession in the mid-’70s.

Sampling must have been “perfected after a lot of experimentation,” Mudgal theorised, with tasters realising that tea not weighing more than a 25-paisa coin was the ideal sampling amount.

But why only use old coins? Mudgal said the new set is too “lightweight”.

And what about using a regular, certified weight? Mudgal shrugged. “Coins work fine. Never really wanted to mess with tradition.”

I later found that holds true for most gardens.

First Quarter

Mudgal’s theory made sense. It was unlikely that the authorities would issue an awkward standard weight of 2.5 gm – even for English planters.

So when the 25-paisa coin was found to fit the bill, the planters latched on to it. But I was still flummoxed by the Pakistani quarter at Namring.

Before leaving for the hills, I had met Namring owner Prateek Poddar in Kolkata to get a heads-up. He would know, right? It was his garden after all.

Wrong. Poddar merely said his grandfather probably acquired the coin when he bought the garden from the British in 1973.

Namring tea estate owner Prateek Poddar tastes various teas in his company’s sampling room in Kolkata, India, after these have been sent from the plantation in the Darjeeling hills. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya.

Neither could Harkaram Chaudhary – a Namring old-hand who has risen from the ranks to the garden manager’s post – explain it. “It was always there,” he told me. “I never really thought about it.”

Namring tea estate manager Harkaram Chaudhary weighing tea samples using an old Pakistani coin as the standard weight. The plantation is located in the Darjeeling hills of India. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya

In all probability, like many antiques at Namring, the coin too was a legacy of the British, left behind by an Englishman arriving from Pakistan.

I inspected it. It was made of copper, and sellotaped to the bottom of one pan of a dented balance scale – also of copper and also a British hand-me-down.

The coin’s faces were so effaced from decades of handling that I could not determine the year of issue. In fact, I was not even sure if there was a year mentioned in the first place.

The old Pakistani coin that is used as a standard weight for measuring 2.5 gm of tea for tasting purposes. This side shows the crescent and the star, and has the words “Quarter Rupee” in capitals. Only the Namring tea estate in India’s Darjeeling district uses a Pakistani coin for this purpose. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya

But it had to be post-1947, I concluded; the word “Pakistan” was legible, and the embossed image of the crescent and star quite clear. Below it, slightly erased, were the words “quarter rupee”.

Namring uses no Indian coin, the Pakistani quarter being the favoured one. As Chaudhary observed wryly, “It serves its purpose.”

The author enjoying a typical evening at the Namring tea estate in Darjeeling. — Photo by Uday Bhattacharya