Describing her new book, The Book of Chai, as a “love affair with chai,” London-based food writer, entrepreneur, and Integrated Healing Practitioner Mira Manek narrates the stories of her relationship with her favorite beverage—one which has endured beyond many a marriage. It has culminated into a successful tea spice blend, sold mainly in the UK, called Chai by Mira, and her latest book.
Evolved as a hybrid of the word "cha" from China and Chia from North Eastern India, "chai" is generally regarded as the Indian word for tea. That said, it is used in other countries such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Russia (of all places) as well. However, the way Manek references it, it is much more than a simple cuppa brew.
Manek’s chai is mix of tea with spices, combined with hot milk and coconut sugar. Since childhood, Manek has been consuming this kind of an elixir consisting of ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, sometimes saffron, and sweetened with sugar or jaggery (or cane syrup) using milk and water in one-half proportions as a base. In her ancestral state of Gujarat, India, she says the formula is half milk and half water for the base because of the general thickness of the milk available there, and the tradition of Indians previously drinking thick Buffalo milk. That said, in the UK, she simply boils skim milk with those ingredients – and since reaching her teenage years, the addition of tea.
India is also home to Darjeeling tea, known as the “Champagne of Teas,” which is brewed by boiling water (or bringing water to slightly under a boil) and pouring it over whole or broken tea leaves for three to five minutes. This renders a yellowish to red brew, depending on the harvest.
Chai made with milk is quite a different beverage. Typically, Darjeeling tea is drunk without any additives, its flavor consisting of its flowery aroma. However, the British, who pioneered the broken leaf standard of tea and who established plantations all over India and Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) began the habit of adding milk and sugar to the strong, broken leaf grade tea. Variations are known as English Breakfast or Irish Breakfast, but the concept is the same.
It wasn’t until I read Manek’s book, that I found out that Assam Dust, which is really a by-product of good Assam tea, happens to be the most popular type of tea used in small Chai stalls all over India. The people who make the tea, often in big steel kettles or large steel drums adding spice to the milk mixture and straining it with cloth, are called chai-wallahs. Famously, the current Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi’s first job was as a chai-wallah. So, one can conclude that chai has permeated through the various classes in India to become the most popular beverage in the country after water.
History of Tea
Indeed, worldwide, tea is the second most consumed drink after water.
These facts can be found in Manek’s book, which she begins with a history of tea, dating back to its mythological origins – both the Chinese and Japanese versions. Then she tells the story of the intrepid Robert Fortune, a British botanist who disguised himself as a Chinese woman to enter China and steal hundreds of tea bushes (and some tea workers) bringing them back to India to replant in Darjeeling. By that time, China had stopped selling tea to the British because they demanded silver in payment, and the British only had so much of that rare metal.
Long before their American cousins figured out that drugs could substitute as currency, the British had begun substituting opium for silver, addicting large swaths of the Chinese population in the process, spurring the Emperor of China to outlaw the drug. While the British continued to clandestinely sell opium to China via Hong Kong and Macao, avoiding the mainland, creating a government department even to oversee opium cultivation in the state of Bihar, India, the Opium Wars that would follow convinced them they needed to create their own supply. This paved the way for Robert Fortune’s famous adventure.
According to Manek, the British had already been growing local tea (Camelia sinensis assamica) in Assam but the China bush (Camelia sinensis sinensis) was replanted in Darjeeling, exhibiting an uncommonly exquisite aroma and flavor – one which they could not replicate in other hilly regions like Kangra Valley of Northern United Provinces (now, the state of Himachal Pradesh), the Kumaon Hills, which like Darjeeling lie in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the hill stations of South India.
The best tea – Darjeeling – was exported to Great Britain. Indeed, Manek says it was the Portugese Princess, Catherine of Braganza, who first popularized tea drinking in 1662 after marrying English monarch, King Charles II because the tea, which had come from India, was part of her dowry. Two centuries later, by the time the British were sending tea from the colonies to the London auction houses, they had become experts in tea cultivation and were the connoisseurs of the best tea.
Indeed, they were so successful in their tea cultivation efforts that they had a tremendous excess of supply. Deciding that the cheaper Assam tea along with analogous southern variants could be sold domestically – after all, Indians were already consuming spiced milk en masse – why not see if tea would catch on?
Combining the fragrance of tea along with the kick of caffeine with the already soothing and spiced confluence of milk and spices, made drinking tea, especially in the morning and the latter half of the afternoon when fatigue would set in, extremely popular.
However, tea was still seen as a British colonial product, writes Manek, not conducive with the movement called Swadeshi, which called on Indians to buy local rather than goods that had been processed in Great Britain using Indian raw materials and sold back to Indians – a process judged to be exploitative because it made huge profits off the colonized masses using goods sourced in the colony itself.
A slick marketing campaign devised by Indian tea cultivators who had bought the tea estates from British owners who were leaving the subcontinent after Indian Independence in 1947, involved posters that featured Indians in traditional garb consuming tea with the slogan, “Tea is 100% Swadeshi,” popularizing the myth of the Indian origins of tea. Needless to say, the ad campaign was a huge success, and India became a huge market for chai.
Manek's Writing Career & Chai Blends
It wasn’t history, however, which drew Manek to tea. Manek started her writing career as a travel writer: “I’d finished my post-grad studies in journalism and happened to marry someone who lived in different places in the world,” says Manek. The circumstances were quite conducive to travel writing, culminating in Manek’s regular column called “Fly with Me” for Gulf News, a widely distributed daily based out of Dubai.
“I actually really enjoyed creative writing,” Manek adds. “After which I really enjoyed the travel element, and the two things crossed over really nicely.” Manek also wrote for other publications including those based in the UK.
After getting a divorce, Manek moved back to London. At the same time, she made regular trips to India and established a social base in Mumbai. The confluence of cultures led her to write two books on food and spirituality, Saffron Soul and Prajna: Ayurvedic Rituals for Happiness.
“Writing my first book, Saffron Soul, was very much connected to my journey in health and wellness, and very much because I had sort of lost those roots and disconnected from those very healthy Indian foods that I grew up eating. As an adult, I became tuned into the jargon of eating small portions of low fat, high-carb foods equating skinny or thin with healthy, rather than the foods that I had grown up with – and this seriously impacted my digestive system as did [the] lifestyle of frequent travel. I was living my day-to-day life with no sense of regularity. And so, when I came to understand that I was doing all the wrong things, and I realized that I needed to go back to eating the food that I’d grown up eating, that’s how the seed of that first book was sown.”
The recipes in her book led to doing events and supper-clubs in London, which promoted her brand, but it became something more than a mere marketing exercise: “I realized that it was something I really wanted to do, almost like a passion project,” Manek says.
She continues: “And from that, the opportunity of setting up a café in central London came about. And again, that's something that just came about. It was not like I ever had the intention of running a café. I had no real past or any experience in that. And from that, at the same time, I was simultaneously writing my book on Ayurveda and on rituals, basically trying to create the sort of ritualistic life based on Indian principles. And inevitably that brought in a lot of Ayurveda into it. So I studied and did a lot of research on Ayurveda during that time and doing yoga myself.”
The café was located inside Triyoga, which is in Soho, Kingly Court. “We served Ayurvedic cuisine, a few dishes, which go obviously hand-in-hand with doing yoga," says Manek. "And we had a whole chai menu. And that's how the chai blends came about because I wanted to create a whole menu focused around chai, around spices, because that's sort of what it was – a celebration of chai.”
Manek has included recipes that pair chai with healthy Ayurvedic foods in her book.
While the lockdown caused by the covid-19 pandemic may have shuttered her physical business, it opened a pathway to the incarnation, which she currently runs. “It was only when lockdown happened and my café closed down that I took the spice blends that I'd created online because so many people were asking me for those spice blends and that's when the business as such was born,” Manek asserts.
Chai drunk in the Indian form, according to Manek, has been available in the West for many years, now. That said, the different combinations and concoctions of herbs, spice, and masala with tea led her to pursue it as a subject for her latest book. “The book is an entity of its own, but essentially it also adds to the whole story of celebrating spice or celebrating chai,” says Manek. “Actually, I think it was only when I did the research for the book that I realized so many things, whether it's the fact that spices have been mixed and drunk before the advent of tea in India, and that tea wasn't even discovered in India until the late 1800s. And, it is because of the British addiction to tea that we even drink tea now in India.”
The technology of the “Crush Curl Tear” (CTC) method of almost granulizing tea leaves lent itself very well to brewing with milk as a base because it produced a very strong brew.
“And that's when like the dust, the tea dust that came off as a by-product from the CTC process, that's what Chai Wallahs mainly use, it being cheaper and producing a lot of flavor with little quantity. It accelerated tea selling in India and even elsewhere,” says Manek.
Chai by Mira Blends
So what tea does Manek use when making Chai by Mira? “My chai spice blends don't actually have tea. It's literally just coconut sugar and spices, so it makes the whole process of making a chai latte for a barista very, very easy. And that's what I go into in the book, that even though chai firstly means tea, secondly, chai is what masala chai is: the combination of spices, tea, milk, sugar, all of those things. What we now in the West have deemed to be a chai latte or a chai tea is more of a sort of drink that focuses on spices than it does on tea. Even though the tea may or may not be there, it's more about the spice and the sugar combination. So, when you go to Starbucks, I think their chai latte contains tea. However, it's a very, very lukewarm, well, mild version of tea. It's more about the spices and the sugar,” Manek explains.
She contrasts her blend with that of Starbucks as similar but spicier, and critically, with the addition of coconut sugar, “which gives it its own wholesome flavor,” she says, claiming that those with a higher spice tolerance prefer her tea blends. “There are a number of people who have tried my [chai spice-ables] who are Indian, who actually prefer my chai,” says Manek, who says most don't even realize the tea is missing. "Some people even add it to tea, but a lot of people feel like it gives them that sweetness, that spice without the need of often having the tea because they might want to be avoiding caffeine. So it really gives everyone their own personal ability to do whatever they want. And the other option, of course, is that you can give it to your children because it’s all natural and contains no caffeine.”
The evolution of the Western palate, especially of those in the UK, is what Manek attributes to the success of her chai blends. She calls it the “globalization of the palate.”
“The Western palate has become more accustomed to spicier flavors. So, the less spicy blends out there, which are less spice, more sugar and very, very sort of refined sugar flavors, are what certain people are realizing are not quite what they want,” says Manek. “They don't really get that kick from it. And that's why, you know, a lot of people are swapping over to spice blends like mine because of the more complex flavor.”
Chai's Connection to India
I ask her when mainstream chains like Starbucks offer chai tea lattes, is it cultural appropriation? “When you realize that the chai as we know it now, or tea, was never drunk in India until the 19th century, and that it was very much introduced to the culture, even though it was growing in India, means that it is a beverage that was taken by Indians and made their own, which lessens this notion that others making it their own is some form of cultural imperialism.”
Manek points out that prior to the British brewing it as a beverage, the local tribe in Assam called Singpos (or Jinpo Tribe) where Camelia sinsensis assamica grew wild, actually used tea leaves in their curries. So, it was a food additive before becoming the beverage that we all know and love.
“Actually, [revolutionary leader Mohandas Karamchand] Gandhi, you know, people like Gandhi were against drinking tea because they deemed it a British product,” Manek says.
“So the cultural appropriation thing is interesting because while it is now and very much an Indian product, it required a fair amount of Indianization. And actually, one of the history professors I was speaking to in Delhi in researching my book, coined the term the “lassification” of chai, which is interesting because what essentially he's saying is that that the drink lassi (which involves mixing milk with ice and fruits) came about much earlier than the drink Chai. And actually, when did the lassification or the Indianization of chai happen? So, while chai wasn't originally Indian, how this many years later, which isn't even that many years later, is Chai known worldwide to be this spicy drink that comes from India, that is very much Indian, that feels like it's steeped in history and yet it's not that ancient, except for the spices is something that has been accepted.”
Personal Relationship to Chai
Manek’s book is filled with stories that revolve around the consumption of chai and stories in which the brewing of varieties of tea-based drinks spur memories of family bonding.
“Drinking chai has always been as constant in my life as Indian food," she says. " And years and years ago, I actually wrote my first novel called “Chai by the Lake”, which I never published. It was essentially stories of my grandmother growing up in a village in Gujarat. And some of the stories that we spoke about were actually me and her sitting by the lake in her village. And that's when I was thinking about my next book and I was thinking about nutrition and all these other things, suddenly I thought, you know what? Why not do it on chai? And why not narrate how and why it has been such a constant in my life? How it has helped frame my lifestyle and the impact it has had on my relationships?”
Going through the stories with her grandmother and other relatives helped polished them into the vignettes that are featured in her book on chai.
“So, it was a really interesting sort of way to ask my grandmother questions and capture things and real details that would otherwise be lost and actually evoke or encapsulate history, which otherwise would be lost.”
Conclusion
One might think that Manek’s life’s journey from travel writer to entrepreneur to author to integrated health practitioner, one which is not a straight path, might have been filled with challenges stemming from her identity and gender. But Manek insists that fate has guided her through the winding journey.
“I wouldn’t be able to tell if gender has affected my progress, but I will say that there are many women who are active in my field, so I don’t have to deal as much with male chauvinism. And, there’s living in London. I mean, it’s a really cosmopolitan city, where, you know, there's a massive, massive Indian community. And I think I personally feel that culture is celebrated more than it's not or different culture (than British) is celebrated more than they're not. And I think times have changed from when I grew up when I certainly faced the challenge of trying to not be too Indian, even with my own Indian friends. So, that was a hurdle for me early on.”
I mention that now it seems that she has a greater connection to her heritage culture than that of her peers. “100%. And I also feel that when I meet people from India, my counterparts in Bombay understand Indian culture in a much more fluid way than Indians in the UK whom my Indian friends regard as somewhat medieval in their lack of flexibility regarding their ideas about Indian culture. So, while that India has moved on, we've stayed very static in the UK in our ways from many, many years ago.”
While this may have been a boon to Manek’s business, the cosmopolitan nature of the people in London, have been at least as critical to its success.
“Chai is no longer simply Indian: it’s global.”
And so is “Chai by Mira.”
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