Chai is the word for tea in Hindi and most other Indian languages, and it begins our journey, because the word itself betrays the original source of these aromatic leaves.
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Its root is the Mandarin word chá.
But the story of how India got its taste for what was originally a Chinese product is far from straightforward.
There is a larger historical narrative about the rise of tea culture within India, and how the ritual of drinking tea became a feature of the modern-day cultural identity of many Indians.
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Factors such as improved transportation and urbanization, advertising, etc morphed British tea into Indian chai.
Tea cultivation began in British India during the early 1800s. Around that time, China had monopoly over the production of tea, which leads to the colonists batting an eye towards India as an alternative base for tea production.
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Experiments to cultivate smuggled tea plants and seeds in the foothills north of Delhi were made but the success was difficult to achieve. Later in 1823, a cousin of the Chinese variety was discovered in Assam. Large areas of subtropical forests were converted into tea plantations, owned by the British, where a brutal history of capitalist exploitation of indentured laborers took place.
The first eight chests of Assam tea were auctioned in London in 1839 and 1888. Soon India displaced China as the biggest supplier of tea to Britain.
The Indian Tea Store came up on Oxford Street in 1881, followed quickly by many replicas. Tea grown in India or Ceylon was merchandised in ostentatious boxes, made of wood snaffled out of timber forests in Dehradun, Simla or Rangoon.
Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, which opened in 1878, was symbiotically rooted to the growth of Indian tea.
After World War I, vendors started selling tea at the historic railway stations of Bengal, Punjab and the Frontier provinces.
In India, local vendors began to add large quantities of milk and sugar into their tea. This came to be known as domestication which led to an explosion in the popularity of both tea and sugar.
By the 21st century, India consumed over 70% of its produce.