Tenshin's Book of Tea & the Chai Wallah

Okakura Kakuzo, Tenshin

There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation... It has not the arrogance of wine, the self- consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.

Among the many excellent photographs on display in the Japanese section of the Tagore museum at Jorsanko in north Calcutta are some intriguing pictures showing the Indian sage in the company of Okakura Kakuzo, also known as Tenshin. They caught the present author's attention because he has previously read Tenshin's famous and eccentric little treatise on tea, The Book of Tea, and because he had no idea that Tagore was an associate of that Japanese writer. The photographs raised many questions about contacts and context. They also sent this writer back to his edition of The Book of Tea, a wonderful little book that is a paean to tea drinking, especially in relation to Japanese aesthetics and Taoist and Buddhist philosophy. It is subtitled 'A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture & the Simple Life':

In this work, Tenshin - now regarded as somewhat old-fashioned in his aesthetic theories - expounds the doctrine, nay the religion, of "Teaism", (as he calls it) a whole world-view, and specifically a view of the world of the Orient, centred upon tea. And why not? As Tenshin writes, "Mankind has done worse!" He asks:

Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself....

And thus begins his extended meditation upon the celestial beverage as the cultural bond of the Orient. In an earlier book, Ideals of the East, Tenshin composed a famous statement of his philosophy that is partially reiterated in The Book of Tea. Like Tagore, he was a Pan-Asianist with a strong internationalist identity. In this sense neither of the two men were narrow nationalists. They have sometimes been criticised and even despised by their countrymen for this. It was a universal perspective, inclusive of the great virtues of Asian civilization, they shared. Tenshin writes:


"Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life."

In The Book of Tea he places tea-drinking at the centre of this Pan-Asian vision. There are certain ironies attached to this, however. Tenshin, like Tagore, promoted the virtues of the 'East' against what he called the 'White Disaster' of European colonialism. Yet he wrote all his works in English and it was in fact the British who joined both sides of the Himalayas with tea. We might think of tea as natural to India - the finest teas, Darjeeling and Assam, come from India after all - yet it was the British who introduced tea growing south of the Himalayas as an economic foil against the Chinese, and it was the British who deliberately promoted tea drinking to the Indian population. Far from being integral to the traditions of Hindoostan, it was only as recently as the 1920s that tea drinking became commonplace throughout the Indian sub-continent. India and China may constitute the two sides of a single Asia, as Tenshin proposes, but it was the White Devil and episodes of European imperialism that made tea the common beverage of both civilizations. Pan-Asian "Teaism" is as much a creation of the British as it is a natural feature of traditional Asian unity.

* * * *

Reading Tenshin's Book of Tea while residing in the back streets of old Calcutta one is confronted by the stark contrast of raw India against refined Japan. There is certainly nothing of the Japanese tea ceremony to be found in the Indian approach to the beverage. The Japanese make tea drinking a fine art: perfectly subtle, beautiful, aesthetic. They discern countless subtleties of flavour in a wide variety of teas according to soil and climate and mode of preparation. The Indian approach, on the other hand, lacks all subtlety. It is a raw and abundant joy, an earthy festivity, but not by any means a refined art.

India’s distinctive tea culture resides in the institution of the chai wallah. They are on every street corner. The tea is strong, milky, sweet and heavily spiced. It is taken in small, potent doses that resemble the way coffee is consumed elsewhere. It is brewed, not steeped. Often it has been simmering for hours. There is nothing delicate about it. If not for the sugar and the spices – ginger and cardamom especially, but sometimes bay laurel and black pepper or cinnamon – it would be bitter. Usually, it is served in small red rough-hewn earthenware cups called bhar which are only used once and then broken, returned to the earth or recycled. More recently though the plastic cup has become popular, a terrible turn of events because of the vast amount of pollution they cause. Much of the charm of chai is in the earthen cups. They are very practical. They have a protruding lip that enables one to hold it with two fingers – a third finger on the base underneath – and avoid burning one’s self since chai is served and consumed piping hot.

In Calcutta, where the author presently resides, the chai cups are the main trade of the city’s potters. They scoop the clay from the Hoogley River and it is to the river that the cups ultimately return.

The present author, let it be known, is himself an enthusiast of tea, a devotee of Teaism. Once more out of phase he has developed an aversion to the ubiquitous coffee culture that has taken hold in Australia and the wider Western world. Coffee is a drug for the shallow journalistic mind. Coffee is the drug of the chattering classes. Tea is the drink of the contemplative. It is with a some disdain that the author watches restless disgruntled Western tourists scouring the streets and markets of Calcutta in search of a coffee fix. The chai wallah is everywhere. Chai culture is a delight. It is a sad symptom of self-consciousness, as Tenshin says, that the "maritime" West has succumbed to the coarse stimulation of the coffee bean. Teaism forever! 

If you are looking for a good resource on the culture of tea drinking in India you cannot go past the following excellent blog, Chai Wallahs of India: http://chaiwallahsofindia.com

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black