Tea festival's missing ingredient By Rajan Chakravarty BBC News, Jorhat, Assam
The plucking season has just finished in the tea gardens of the north-east Indian state of Assam. To mark the event, a unique tea tourism festival was hosted in the town of Jorhat, 310km (194 miles) from Assam's main town of Guwahati, to woo foreign tourists in the area and revive the mystique of Assam tea, once known as the finest quality tea in the world.
J Syamala Rao, Jorhat's deputy commissioner, said it was not the first such festival - but it was being held on a grand scale.
With an eye towards the lucrative Western tourist market, the Assam government and tea planters in Jorhat gave the visitors a glimpse of life during the heydays of the British Raj, when Assam tea was the favoured beverage of the English aristocracy.
Beautiful colonial-era bungalows, set amid verdant tea gardens, gave 21st century tourists a taste of life that existed in the tea gardens around Jorhat almost two centuries ago.
But one disappointment was the Indian government's failure to find the descendants of the Scotsmen who first brought tea to this part of the world.
Robert C Bruce and his brother Charles, in the employ of the British East India Company, are credited with bringing tea to Assam.
The tea plant was growing in the wild in the jungles of Assam way before the commercial production of tea started in India in the 1830s.
The local Singpho tribes people were known to consume tea leaves as a vegetable along with garlic. Some of the Singphos drank the brew after dipping it in boiled water.
According to historical records, Robert C Bruce first discovered tea plants in the wild near Jorhat with the help of a Singpho tribal chief in 1823.
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