Smo Das

Summary of interview with Smo Das (A) re. Tea industry

Conducted by Alan Macfarlane in the Morse House on 6.10.2001

- asked about his early life and training

- born in Bombay in 1951, mother half English

- Doon school, first degree in Calcutta

Joined the tea industry in 1972, left India in 1981

Williamson Magor tea company (and later names)

- why into tea: a default option, one of the few industries that dominated, only choice, a lot of employment.

- first impressions? Spent two years in office before going to Assam, went up to Assam in 1975

- I was about 24, had been box wallah with chauffeur driven car etc. in Calcutta, shown a bicycle, a culture shock.

- you didn't go in as a trainee, but as a replacement for somebody, an Assistant Manager. You had about one week of training from previous person.

- advice on standing in front of tea pluckers, mown down by snakes etc.

- 'the law of management was, the louder you shouted the more effective you were, so you yelled'

- 'an interesting contrast with modern management practices which are about persuading people rather than yelling at them'

- (A) why did you yell? - because people stupid or...

- 'the implication is that you are dealing with people who do not respond in a normal way, they are not educated poor things..... they are out there and they respect being yelled at, they expect the Sahib to shout. Quite honestly it was not really like that, you worked your tea labour through a line of command and the people who actually got things to happen you talked to in a normal fashion. They yelled and also there was a bit of posturing somehow.'

- incident of man who wants to pee

- this chap had said 'you have got to yell and get on with it, but you also have to be fair... for instance if it pouring with rain, you don't push them as hard as normal, they want to go home .... think about it, you do have options like leaving a bit of tea unplucked that day and coming back to it the next day....'

- story of spraying squad - you mustn't stop because you will burn the leaves - peeing
and I had to respond very quickly to see if I would keep control of the situation - makes a joke of it.

- so you needed a bit of humour

- if you had used those techniques with the clerks in Calcutta, you would have been out on your ear in about two minutes flat...

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A. reminds of one of a sergeant major, also use of 'squad' - an army task etc.

- bear some roots, because all management thinking came from the army command and control, in fact that model has only broken down in the last twenty years, probably a fair parallel

- and very organized, the difference between a tea estate in Assam and a neighbouring field is the difference between the organized and unorganized, I think it is even called the unorganized sector. It is about process and tasks and campaigns...

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A. impressions of British staff - stories and memories of them, talk about them?

- several ex-pats still there, my Manager was English (and in Calcutta), all the Senior positions were still British.

- there had been the big exodus post-devaluation and then the rest carried on

- that continued (from mid 1970s) for about another ten years

- the ghosts of the ones who had left were still there, most of the stories were about 'old so and so'

A. what sort of ghosts? Old ruthless imperial horrors or... eccentric Englishmen?

- much nearer the eccentric Englishmen than the ruthless Attila the Hun character

- most stories who had become part of the landscape, it was their home, when they came back to England they were a misery, no they had given their best and certainly the tea garden staff I spoke to they really looked up to these people. I can talk about Chris Allen as he was my boss, he had been thirty.... Most of the people on that estate even if you go back now will look back with warmth and they loved having them in charge. And I think the main reason why the British were liked so much, whether it was in Calcutta or in tea was because of fairness, perceived fairness. In fact the bad ones we heard about were normally guys who were stealing things - (gives eg.), they were just crooks, if you like. They weren't horror stories about mistreatment of people, which is interesting and in fact I can tell you that the feeling in India for people who were caught in this transition between having English bosses and Indian bosses , nine out of ten would have voted to have a British boss. And I can say that as an Indian. And that is whether they were a domestic servant , even to this day I know of domestic servants who manage to avoid working for an Indian family if they could help it... (e.g.) 'it is partly because they feel they are treated better and they are treated fairly'

- many of the Indians who took over from the British were just Brown versions, just as many people would accuse me of being... I don't consider it an insult at all. They were Brown Sahibs and they did perhaps inherit how to look after people in a firm but fair way. No, very few horror stories. If they have been unpleasant people in tea, most of them have not been from the ex-pat community, strangely enough.

- some who went may have had reasons for getting away from here (criminals etc), economic migrants etc. yet despite that you may have got eccentricity, but inhumanity, beastliness, that sort of thing, very little, very little of that. I can't remember many stories, I would really have to hunt to find an example.

A - what about the memsahibs?

There were some famous Memsahibs, but again most of the Burra Mems were - it was maternalism... it was done for the best , there were some very tough ones and there were some less tough ones, but my B.M. - how would she have been viewed? Very kind hearted, you can tell from the bungalow servants, they are the ones who will tell you. We knew because one of their main bearers came to work for us - so we knew what it was like to work inside their house. She was the one they would go to if they had a problem. She was seen as compassionate. No, there is not enough stuff there to make the journalists happy.

- the whole British in India thing to me was much more an efficient machine for wealth transfer if you like. Somebody told me, an Englishman, that 25% of the U.K's income in 1900 came from India alone, which tells you something. And to me you don't get in the say of an efficient machine by being brutal... it just gets in the way.
It wasn't even on the agenda for most people to do that sort of thing. Obviously there would be the odd occasions. So very fond memories, it was still very much British dominated when I arrived and it changed while I was still in tea. One by one these guys went home.

- A. so basically the British as a nation of shop keepers... to make money efficiently

- I think the British, Britain Ltd's aim was, I am not saying that each individual. I think most of the individuals out there in tea were out there to earn enough money to live, they were economic migrants most of them, they must have been. It was like the opposite of today. Your country here did not have enough wealth to employ the people in it, so far as I can tell, so they had to go all over the world to try to make a living.... It will always happen.

- they were certainly there for economic reasons, they saved up what they could... spent as little as they could, which we saw signs of, definitely, they did not spend much money, which would be putting it mildly... a bit tight-fisted perhaps.

- there were some who were terribly generous, .... there were no polo matches going on at that stage. Still the tennis and the club meets. A vast amount of drinking. They worked hard and played hard. I was surprised when I got up there to find out how hard the work was actually.

As a box wallah we had been told - all we saw when we went up was the club etc.
But when you got there you found these guys had to work pretty hard.

There is a good technical reason. Thirty or forty years ago you just pruned the tea right down. . So basically you did not pluck between October and March. By the time I got up there in the mid '70s, three quarters of the garden would be skiffed anyhow- a light pruning, just the top of the bushes. One year I remember we stopped plucking on Christmas eve, and we got going again by the middle of January. We only had two weeks or so of not tea, but in the old days when tea planters really did have a nice time, they had a six months season. ... You just went shooting and fishing and what you wanted to do.

The factory side was even worse, they were mostly under-machined factories, so they could not cope with the peak days so you ran continuously for up to a week, which is not very nice.

The British provided leadership. Those who remained were there because they were very good at what they were doing. There was no way they were there just because they were there.

A. the other side of fairness is aloofness

- definitely true, though not so much by the time I arrived. (reminiscences in Calcutta, living close by;

- certainly in the tea context there was lots of fraternizing with the natives, but it was nearly always done on the quiet, there was definitely a barrier, their defence mechanism I suspect and they stayed behind it. - children sent to school to England, to make sure they did not get contaminated I suppose.

- non-integration of Calcutta swimming club until the mid 1950s, until there was a Communist govt. - Tolygunge club etc.

- less pronounced up in tea.

- there is also a big class issue here. If you are from a particular 'class' and are brown, green or yellow, you have more in common with an Englishman from that background, than they would ever have with someone they think is from the lower class, even if they were English

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There was even more of a barrier between the upper middle class, say the Burra Sahibs and a possible tea planter who may have come from an entirely different class from over here, that barrier was probably much greater than that between two brown middle class people.

A. what about conditions of labourers when you were there - appalling earlier accounts.

- by 1975 things has moved on dramatically I can say. I can talk about my experiences in the Williamson M. estates. I don't believe you compare Tinsukia in Assam with Tunbridge Wells. But if you compare the lot of the people living next door to the estates, Assamese people tilling their fields, living on the land, and what have the government been able to provide for them in terms of medical care, schools etc. That is a fair comparison... In terms of medical care it was excellent. Really very good. Superb hospitals. And we had private aircraft for emergencies to fly people out - I know staff members did. Medical care was very good comparatively. ... (cf. Nagaland today!)

- schooling, not bad, a big minus was putting economic pressure on people to come out and pluck, but I think that has moved on a bit, most families would send their kids out to work rather than go to school, because they needed their money. Can't remember the minimum age- whatever it was, would have been followed. Easily policed. There were vast amounts of legislation to protect the labourers, they had Unions, but the soft things are the important things.

I'll give you an example where the Company were not proud, and I was not proud, and that was the housing. Half the houses on the estate were 'pukka', they were still pretty awful, but they were 'pukka'. And the other half were 'katcha' houses which had to be re-thatched every year at vast expense and we would have been much better off building the houses. Now, what they did was - cement was in short supply and all housing programs subject to availability of cement. But if you needed cement to extend the factory, that took priority. Needs must meant that the labour houses did not get done. You would supply water pumps - just hand pumps - bits would not be available etc. They tried to improve... beginning to pay more attention to the labour line.

Housing was mixed, medical was good, education o.k., but subject to pressures (as in England at that time). In terms of wages, because that is all collectively bargained, the average wage levels were WAY above the unorganized sector... (Assamese landlords, wages would have been a fraction. Their workers would have killed to get a job on the tea estate.

A. a huge change from before, press gangs etc. any sign of that?

- moneylenders they seemed to lend money for marriages etc. A new kind of bondage. And the other was alcohol, Nepali traders, I remember throwing them out.
We pounced on them. The bondage had changed to that of being in debt and feeling of hopelessness.

- the conditions I have to say, though still much better than next door, were still such that they were places where you would prefer to keep a goat , you wouldn't as a human being really want to live in those conditions. Unfortunately typical of most of India.

We should remember the profits that were made between 1870 and 1970 beggars belief. I mean, some of these profits were embarrassing. It was not uncommon to make two and a half times its issued capital in a single year. Alright it went on taxes and other things, but tea was a money-spinner - still is. As far as I can tell with the tea industry, when they are having a 'down' they are better off than most industries I have since worked in here. (Smo's profession - helping recoveries).

So if you balance the enormous profits by the owners of these companies over these years against how much they put back into these things, then it is not a terribly good story and I think people would be right to challenge it. But that could be the same in many industries.

A. same in other plantations. Did it improve at all when a number of Companies became Indian concerns?

- I would say it probably went backwards, actually. I think the progressive British firms were ahead of the Indian ones. I mean - you can publish it as you wish. Speaking freely, the Indian entrepreneur has not been the best the most responsible corporate citizen.

A. so now - your impression that things would have been on a level or declining since you left.

- I have visited and kept in touch and I get the impression that certainly as far as a life being up in Assam it has lost all its nice bits, because of terrorism in Assam and people being kidnapped on tea estates it has become a pretty horrible environment. How much worse or better off the labourer is today, against his local counterpart, I don't know the answer to that. But I suspect it has not changed a huge deal. Again difficult to tell, because there is a whole new middle class in India, and I don't think the tea garden labour have got into that. But maybe the staff have.

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A. asked about health, malaria etc. a problem?

- no malaria problem by time I got there. Spraying etc. Little incidents etc. Back in some areas. Originally sorted with DDT. Stagnant water cleared up. Air conditioner etc. Originally horrendous - but a past issue.
Alcoholism was the main health worry. It was serious - lying by side of the road, hundreds of workers after cinema. Drank deadly stuff. Told that they drank because there was a calorie shortfall - and hence drink. So they could work. But it does not have nutrition, which is why they were so thin. They were very thin - as was everybody else in India. Also working from dawn to dust. But alcoholism amongst tea estate labour was much higher than in rural India.

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A. hours of work? Lot of work done by women.

- they were better at it, basically. Generally based on 'tika', that is incentive based. Paid on output, rather than input. Daylight hours. Machine shifts with spraying, we did two six-hour shifts. Twelve hours. People on plucking they could work ten or twelve hours a day. Quite a lot of the time is also spent gossiping, chatting.

A. asks about how much they could pick. Gives ridiculous figs...

- I seem to remember top pickers, figures as high as 20 and 30 kg. For top pluckers.
But it is not the tip, it is not the two leaves and a bud, which is the fine plucking. A lot of it is good heavy, getting down to branches. For every thing they pluck, there would be ten or twenty times the weight of the two leaves and a bud.

- if you lost control of a gardens, which happened in the monsoons, then you would get a lot of twigs, you can't fine pluck. Those who wanted to make money, could. Those who couldn't ended up in the bungalows - as servants etc.

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42.:20 - section on sexual behaviour of planters. Omitted.

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A. did anyone ever talk about the medical properties of tea. What was so good about tea?

- tea was just regarded as a good thing. A cup of tea as healthy and good - various stories about this. We felt quite happy that we were producing something that was beneficial. No doubts about that. We would know coffee - caffeine etc. But it was not organic the way we grew it. We poured piles of fertilizers, pesticides etc. on it. It was factory farming on a grand scale. Looking back now, then it looked the only way to do it, now I am not so happy about it. I believe it is changing in some parts, but not very quickly I don't think. But now the supermarkets are beginning to bring organic teas onto the shelves.

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A. Anything you would like to add.

- certain parts of the world, like Calcutta and Assam are so dependent on tea, apart from oil in Assam there is not much else. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people's jobs are dependent on it. What struck me in defence of tea, is the difference : India, which is supposed to know all about growing rice, in the league tables of yield per acre, came 52nd in the world. In tea we were first by miles. And that I find very encouraging. That to me was the effect of having companies, large holdings, professionalism, even with all the profits coming out, the end result was more productivity. And I believe you don't worry about distributing wealth until you know about how to create it. If you create it, you can raise people's living standards. You can't otherwise. As an efficient enterprise to employ lots of people and give India the position that it still enjoys, I believe that if we had not had the British and the plantation type industry, we would have had thousands of small-holdings like Turkey and places - which is appalling. Just contrast Turkey and India, on how to do it and how not to do it. I have been to Turkey - I brought examples back. A broker said the stuff brought back, unsaleable at any price. .... It is just done like a back garden hobby. And big government factories, or used to be anyhow.

- so private sector, well organized, all the capitalism bit which people are so quick to criticize actually employs people. If we'd had a socialistic sort of commune way of doing it, I can assure you half the people would be in work and the standards would be appalling, in the hospitals etc. So I have to say, of the models that we have had, this one worked. And to this day, anything in India which came from that sort of background outperforms the small kibbutz type thought process.

A. how did Indian tea outperform Chinese, given relative wages etc.

- opium had something to do with this, Chinese jats etc. Assam jat of tea outperformed the Chinese. Much weaker bush - low yield, prone to disease etc. inferior. That must have had much to do with it. Plus focus. Suited the powers to be to make it happen. While China was completely distracted by the various events.

A. did Chinese tea have shorter growing season?

- probably this caused by climate in China, everything to do with daylight hours & climate. In Darjeeling, some seven years after planting before yield, in Assam only two.

Thanked him... ends. At 56 mins.

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