A coalition of small tea growers in Darjeeling district, India, brought together in 2018 by acclaimed tea master, Swaraj Kumar “Rajah” Banerjee, 77, called Rimpocha Tea has sold an off-season harvest of Darjeeling region Himalayan tea for the record-breaking price of $5,000/kg.
Shattering his own record for India, Banerjee left connoisseurs amazed by developing a batch of white tea called Silver Tips White Imperial Full Moon during a period when Darjeeling tea gardens are pruning rather than plucking. That Banerjee could do the counterintuitive is not at all inconceivable when one considers that since the 1970s, his name has been synonymous with those steep and verdant Darjeeling slopes to which bushes known to produce the world’s finest teas cling.
Tea cultivators are typically eccentric (if not a little crazy) in chasing the perfect cup. Rajah Banerjee’s madness for tea has devoted him to brewing elixirs evoking wonder and delight in the human palate for over a half century.
Rajah in Sanskrit means king, and for forty-seven years, Rajah Banerjee was the "King of Tea" at Makaibari Tea Estate, revolutionizing tea cultivation and marketing in Darjeeling. As Director of Makaibari, he made a name for himself cultivating teas that set pricing records. Back then, he probably didn’t think he’d break his highest record after leaving Makaibari.
When Banerjee left the garden in 2017, it was three years after selling most of his stake to the large and diversified, Luxmi Tea Company Private Limited. After his ancestral bungalow burned down in a tragic fire, he not only felt it was time to go, but he also decided he would divest his remaining shares in the estate, which his family had owned for four generations, to those who toil on the land. He is, notably, the only tea estate owner to walk away in this fashion.
His career began in 1970 when, back from university in England, Banerjee decided to learn about what it takes to run a tea estate from his father. Atop a horse, trotting through the forests around the tea estate, he felt that the trees were talking to him, and his vision for Makaibari – one that set the standard for the industry – began to form.
Leading his peers, even those who wanted to abandon chemicals in the cultivation of tea but found it too arduous or costly, Banerjee pioneered organic tea cultivation in Darjeeling, opening a path for others to do the same. That said, he went one step further, applying concepts of biodynamic farming, which essentially amounts to leaving much of the land uncultivated, allowing trees and diverse flora to flourish above ground while feeding the terroir beneath.
Notably, Banerjee was the first to bring Fairtrade standards to Indian tea gardens as well.
The First Moonlight Plucking
Banerjee is famously known for establishing plucking at night by the light of a full moon when the celestial bodies in the heavens align in just the right way. Believing that if the phases of the moon can move the oceans to create tides, with the Earth’s bright satellite acting as a gravitational magnet in the sky, it just might pull the honeyed juices locked up in the tea plant to the edges of the leaves, making them that much more flavorful. It produced Banerjee’s first record-setting tea.
Moonlight plucking is a practice that has caught on in Darjeeling, but Banerjee was the first to do it and made it into a ritual involving dressing up in traditional garb, belting out folk songs, and swaying in dance to the beat of drums. Aside from the moon, he used torches to illuminate the plucking. Significantly, he utilized expert pluckers in the process – those with the capability to recognize which leaves to pick in the dark and the knowhow of just how to pry them from the plants.
The tea, called Makaibari Silver Tips Imperial, became the most premium tea in Darjeeling, selling at the end of Banerjee’s reign at Makaibari Tea Estate at close to $3,000/kg. It was known to be a favorite of the late Queen Elizabeth II with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi giving a gift box to her when he met her at Buckingham palace in 2015.
But Makaibari Silver Tips Imperial, which is analogous to the one just produced by Banerjee, is a white tea made from the most delicate and nascent leaves that is typically cultivated from spring to early summer when the plants are "flushing" most intensely and the flavor of the leaves is at its zenith. It is rather unheard of to do a moonlight plucking of such white tea in autumn.
Rimpocha Silver Needles White Imperial Full Moon
Confounding conventional wisdom and going against the flow of the seasons, Banerjee was able to guide his team to look for the buds that are so young, they are covered in silvery white fibers for protection (hence the name, "white tea"). He then processed the batch, passing on instructions by phone to the various village hubs, into the rarest of rare autumnal white moonlight plucked tea. It’s no wonder the unique tea broke Banerjee’s own price record.
Initially, the endeavor was not in the offering. When asked to make the tea, Banerjee was reticent. The buyer who hailed from the UK wanted Banerjee to produce an exemplary tea for him that could be entered in competition at the World Tea Expo in 2025, held in Las Vegas. Famously, Banerjee is loath to enter his teas in such contests. “I like to set my own benchmark,” he insists.
His colleague Diliram Sharma, who inspired him to start the Rimpocha venture in 2018, a year after he left Makaibari Estate, implored Banerjee to try, believing that Rimpocha, being a small and relatively new operation (but building a following in India) needed some international exposure in an export market dominated by century old estates and big companies.
Still, Banerjee was not on board. He questioned the feasibility to the buyer: “So, you are asking me to make a tea for you when the bush is about to go to sleep, and nobody's ever done that before! Sorry, not going to happen!” Banerjee exclaimed, shaking his head and hanging up the phone.
Yet something stirred inside of him as is known to happen with this man. Never one to turn down a challenge, it was not long before Banerjee and his team at Rimpocha set about looking for the right bushes – this too among those grown in small tea farms spread across four villages. It was a daunting task, but Banerjee felt compelled to try, even if it meant risking failure. The stakes had somehow risen in his mind during this short period.
There are some in the parochial Darjeeling planter community (in which everyone pretty much knows each other) who remark on Banerjee’s exceptional ability to market his teas as being responsible for his tea being sold at record prices. “He sells to private buyers,” one garden manager told me, adding, “so his record-breaking teas aren’t valued at auction in Calcutta.”
Most gardens send their teas to be sold at an auction house in Calcutta (now called Kolkata), established in the era of the British Empire where tea tasters set a base price and buyers bid on the teas from that point. In this pressurized atmosphere, the bidding activity has known to become tumultuous.
A competitor of Banerjee’s once told that he had heard of a moonlight plucking that was done by bare-breasted virgins. Whether myth or fact, this certainly wouldn’t fly in the 21st century – and there is no record of it having happened. Still, it is the kind of mythmaking that surrounds Banerjee and, in a way, typifies his distinctive marketing style, setting him apart from other cultivators. In telling the stories behind the tea that ultimately helped sell his “Magical Mystical Himalayan Herbs” as he liked to call tea at Makaibari, he has become the story itself: Part of the ethereal mist that rolls into Darjeeling gardens swiftly and unexpectedly.
Famously, it was worked into the films of legendary Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray (the first Indian to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival and recipient of an honorary Oscar), that the discerning and sophisticated protagonist of the most famous detective film series ever made by the film maestro only drank Makaibari tea. The films of the series began screening in 1974, making the scenes of sipping Makaibari the first instance of product placement in Indian cinema, perhaps even beating Hollywood to the punch. That is Rajah Banerjee: Riding the crest of a wave of firsts.
Rimpocha’s autumn harvest of Silver Needles White Imperial Full Moon would be yet another first. Around two hundred female farmers picked the leaves at four villages. In the end, the Rimpocha team was able to produce ten kilograms from it. To put this in perspective, tea buds are the tiniest part of the plant. These are leaves that are just emerging and have yet to open. So, they are small – really small.
It can take thousands of needle-like buds to accumulate even one kilogram of tea. So, multiply that effort tenfold, and one may come to realize just what a prodigious task it was to produce 10 kg of Silver Needles White Imperial Full Moon. Scale the effort even more when considering that the buds in autumn are few and far between, unlike the peak growing seasons of spring and summer.
Rimpocha Silver Needles White Imperial Full Moon is a thin and long-leafed tea shaped to a point of a needle, colored white and silver with a tinge of green. When brewed, depending on the length of the steep, the liquid released from the pointed whole leaves ranges in color from a light gold to a mild coppery hue.
Having tasted the tea, courtesy of Rajah Banerjee, I can say that it results in a remarkable cup, giving off the fresh organic scent of a garden that is considerably floral and herbaceous in nature. The first sip has a fruity nose when it glances the tongue. As the flavor opens on the palate, notes hinting of berries, magnolia, and a strong aroma of chamomile emerge; it has a mildly vegetal body that balances out the tea’s natural sweetness. The texture is velvet smooth with no astringency (unless over steeped – but even then, it’s slight). It leaves a subtle but effervescent aftertaste on the tongue. Overall, it’s an experience that is exquisite, if not astonishing!
The leaves can be brewed more than once. In fact, upon second steeping, the magnolia character dominates.
I was amazed that Banerjee and his Rimpocha team could get such consistency in the tea, combining leaves from four villages into what can only be called a blend impersonating a single estate tea. He said that the team had to look for emergence of the very last growth before dormancy set in, and then the peasant botanists who make up Rimpocha plucked only the buds from these plants – that too, gingerly and with great care. Many were discarded, which did not meet the leaf standard sought.
Banerjee says he has been developing the polyclonal bushes used in the villages from where Rimpocha sources its tea for 27 years. While at Makaibari, he did quite a bit of experimenting with tea. “It was my laboratory,” he says.
After leaving Makaibari in 2017, an herbal cultivator named Diliram Sharma who had worked on an initiative at Makaibari created by an Italian company called Qualiteherbe, that enabled marginalized village women to grow herbs, approached Banerjee on how to write the next chapter of his story.
Sharma insisted that Banerjee should not let his experiments at Makaibari languish in his absence, imploring him to mentor villagers in growing tea. As Banerjee likes to tell it, “Diliram said you cannot be an island of prosperity in a sea of unhappiness,” referring to the struggling villagers whose aim it was to cultivate a profitable crop. “And so, you must pay back, and you must mentor villages,” Banerjee says of what Sharma had pitched to him. After taking a year off to rest, Banerjee took Sharma up on his proposal.
Banerjee calls Sharma the “principal instrumentalist in the symphony that is Rimpocha,”
So, in 2018, Rimpocha Tea was born. The name comes from “Rimpoche” or precious one, reserved in the Tibetan language for the reincarnation of an enlightened soul – a Buddha. With Cha meaning tea, “Rimpo-cha” is a reincarnation of tea. It is also the reincarnation of Rajah Banerjee’s life in tea.
Partnership Not Ownership – Rethinking the Tea Estate Model
Banerjee distinguishes Rimpocha from Makaibari in its egalitarian approach. “At Makaibari, there was a two-way sense of entitlement. These were my people, my instructions top down, etcetera….Over here [in Rimpocha], there is no sense of entitlement – there is only synergy, equal strategy release,” says Banerjee. “And, if it’s your own cow, I don’t need to tell you how to look after it. You are more than capable of looking after it, provided that you are adequately compensated for the milk that I want you to produce.”
Banerjee goes on to explain that it is “a matter of partnerships, not ownerships. That is the difference. And, if you can coordinate this partnership in a dynamic sense, this is the result: the impossible is possible.”
The tea is processed at four locations that he calls artisanal studios and craft centers rather than small factories. Beginning as a small community project, Rimpocha now produces around twenty tons of tea each year – something that in 2017, the villagers would have considered an impossible dream.
Banerjee credits the quality and output to the synergistic approach of the Rimpocha team, which he claims belies that of the conventional tea estate. “The tea estate concept is passé; it’s outmoded; it harkens back to a colonial period during which we Indians paid the Sahebs [British sic.] for our own slavery,” says Banerjee. “Awareness and technology are levelling off such hierarchies, and so I really believe that unless [tea companies] must do a rejig of or re-think, Darjeeling estates will dither and collapse.”
According to Banerjee, the tea estate model worked during colonial times because absentee landowners could pass on orders through the Tea Estate Managers or Burra Sahebs to workers, and out of fear of punishment, they had to comply. However, he says the days of absentee landowners running estates in Darjeeling are numbered. Increasingly, control will have to be decentralized to the garden level, else the gardens will risk being shut down.
Despite Banerjee’s strong opinions about obsolescence of the colonial tea estate in today’s environment, his words ring with some measure of irony, for at Makaibari he did not do what he is doing with Rimpocha. Rather, he sold to a large company that has diversified holdings in tea estates, carpets, and furniture: The very definition of an absentee garden owner.
He explains his reasoning: “I left the legacy to a person [sic.] with deep pockets – the Chatterjees [who own Luxmi Tea Company Pvt. Ltd], and I’m sure if you open the pages [of promotional material] today, you'll see ‘tea set for connoisseurs.’ So, no matter how badly off the Darjeeling industry is, Makaibari will never be stopped,” Banerjee says, fists pumped, seemingly unaware of the paradox in his words.
In the end, Rimpocha is perhaps an effort to accomplish that which he could not do around ten years ago when Banerjee sold his majority stake to Luxmi. It is a fact that much has changed in the district over the past decade. The crippling 105-day strike in 2017 opened the foreign market up to cheaper Nepal tea as a substitute for Darjeeling tea, and Covid-19 made 2020 an unviable year. Hence, the Darjeeling tea industry is not in the shape it was in when Banerjee decided to cede control of Makaibari to Luxmi.
Today, Banerjee hopes that initiatives like Rimpocha will show the rest of Darjeeling that by empowering the growers through making them partners, companies can find a way out of perennial labor disputes. Certainly, this new autumn variety of Silver Needles White Imperial Full Moon makes it clear that the high quality of tea produced in the region has the potential not just to continue, but to end up exceeding anything that came before.
Rimpocha may be the reincarnation of Rajah Banerjee’s tea life, but it could also lead to the Darjeeling tea industry’s reincarnation if the thinking of estate owners undergoes the same evolution that Banerjee has experienced. Signs are that directors of some of the larger companies are contemplating such change.
Indeed, as industry analysts focus on the problems that Darjeeling planters face, in the Rimpocha way of cultivation lies an opportunity for traditional planters to see the tradition of the “Champagne of Teas” flourish far into the future.
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