Host & Producer: Niki Aggarwal

Research: Ranvijay Singh

Sound Engineering & Design: Hanisha Harjani

Factchecking: Abhishta Tantry and Delilah Righter

Cover Art: Suraj Venkataram

Teacher’s Guides: Nishi Crook

Marketing: Priya Phagu

FEATURED MUSIC

Charanjit Singh | Raga Bhairav

Brain Drop | Brain Drop vs. Silent Horror

FINGERGAP | 恭喜你

Codec | Trap Bach

Jamblu | Hypocrite Pt 1

Aloo Gobi | Spicy

Lifeform | Inert AI

Pashmina

A Kashmiri shawl made of spun cashmere from the Changthangi goat

Canton

Known today as Guangzhou, a huge port city in China on the eastern bank of the Pearl River

Sharbat

A sweet cordial made from fruits or flowers, served cold. Common across the Middle East and South Asia

Neera

Also called palm nectar, a sweet, translucent drink made from the sap of toddy palms

This episode covers 300 years, 3 commodities and 3 countries, so very understandable you wanna learn more. Here’s where to start:

Andy Liu’s new book Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India and Rolf Bauer’s new(ish) publication The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth Century India were in many ways the backbone of our research.

This excerpt from Sarah Rose’s book on Robert Fortune’s tea theft is delicious.

Jayeeta Sharma provided a stunning analysis of how and why the British built a migrant workforce on the tea plantations of Assam in her paper “Lazy Natives”

Annotated transcript available here.

Opening

[Multiple voices]

This is not chai. This is a chai tea latte.

You have to stop saying chai tea. It’s just chai.

Chai tea is not a thing.

Chai is tea.

Exactly!

Tell them, dad!

Chai is tea.

Introduction

My name is Niki Aggarwal and you're listening to Misrepresented, a podcast where I tell you a story about a history that we don't get quite right today. If this is your first time listening to Misrepresented, well, what a treat for you because it is our season finale and we saved up an especially hot topic history for y'all: the story of chai.

Working on this story changed me. I had always associated chai with the sacred. It was an ancient ritual as old as the Vedas. I'm sure I saw some painting somewhere in Delhi that depicted the Buddha drinking a cup of chai. Well, either that painting was super anachronistic, or, it was a case of TikTok's favorite theme, the Mandela Effect.

Because the reality is, chai as we know it today is only about 100 years old.

To put that into perspective, Coca Cola is older than masala chai. 100 years ago, Indians were so unaccustomed to chai that the tea industry had to run massive ad campaigns to teach people on the subcontinent how to brew tea.

Chai is such a recent entry into South Asia that even the word chai isn't really ours. It's a direct derivative of the Mandarin word for tea.

Language is one of the coolest sources when it comes to historical records, because it says something about how one culture related to another.

For example, we use the word "loot" because the British learned the word, "lootana," the verb for stealing in Hindi, when they were looting treasure from all of South Asia.

Another way language travels is through trade. In English, we use the word "cashmere" because merchants acquired pashmina shawls from Kashmir and brought them back to Europe.

But in the case of chai, Indian merchants didn't get tea from China. Chai has always been made with the tea grown natively in Assam. And Indians definitely didn't colonize China. That's not how we got the word tea. No, the reason we use a Chinese derivative of tea is a little convoluted. And violent.

Chai as we know it today fueled European brutality across the globe. In the name of tea, wars were waged. Millions of human beings were enslaved and underground drug markets were born. And then, after centuries of violence, a group of people came in, erased that dark history, and replaced it with the whitewashed cultural understanding of chai that many of us hold today.

So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through the true story of chai and reveal who was behind the campaign to rebrand the drink into a symbol of South Asian pride.

Chapter One

Like the word chai, our story begins in China. China had had a tea drinking culture for thousands of years. Researchers have found teawares in tombs from the third century BCE. And it's likely tea culture predates that.

A millennia or two ago, tea culture spread through religion as buddhist monks brought tea and their knowledge to places like Japan and Korea. And then later, China traded tea for horses with the Arab kingdoms. But the tea trade was relatively small scale until the 17th century, when big business arrived.

This was the age of exploration when European kingdoms were bravely sailing across uncharted territory in the name of scientific inquiry. And because they wanted to gain control over the wealth, resources and culture Asia had to offer.

This is why and when all of those East India companies were founded. The Dutch East India Company, the Danish East India Company. And of course, the British East India Company.

Once European elites developed a taste for tea, ships flooded the Canton docks, desperate for as much tea as they could get their hands on.

And for many of these East India companies, that worked out great. They sold goods from their kingdoms to Chinese merchants, and then used that silver to buy tea from tea sellers in China.

But the British East India Company had a little bit of a problem. At that point in time, England really just had one commodity to offer: wool. While that wool had served them well in medieval times, no one really wanted it in the 17th century. Especially not the Chinese.

It's like a game of Settlers of Catan, where, if you double down on sheep, you're gonna be solid in the beginning, but everyone's gonna industrialize and all people need are wheat and ore. No one wants your fricking sheep.

In this case, the ore and wheat were Indian cottons and Chinese silks. Since the British had nothing of use to offer, it was a one-way trade where they just had to use up their silver for tea.

That works until you run out of silver. As their coffers slowly dwindled, they knew they needed to make a change.

So the options were to stop selling tea in London-- not really an option-- or find something else that they could sell to China. They spent some time thinking-- almost a century-- and then finally realized that there was one commodity that no one could say no to: drugs.

Chapter Two

Peasants in Bengal had cultivated opium poppies for centuries. Folks used to eat a small amount, much in the same way that we pop Tylenol or ibuprofen today.

But one poppy plant could go a long way, so peasants typically only grew one or two plants for their own use. If they had any left over, they sold it to the nobility, for whom opium had become a luxury of choice during the Mughal era.

Within just 10 years though, Bengal's rural areas would be covered in poppy fields.

In 1757, the British East India Company won the Battle of Plassey, which basically meant that they got to have free reign over all of Bengal and Bihar. The company immediately used this victory to turn the people and their homes into profit.

They basically said, "Hey, we, the almighty company, will give you, lowly farmer, an interest free advanced payment if you grow opium poppies."

But the catch was that the expenses to grow that poppy, from the land to the labor to the irrigation. All of those expenses, when added up, they were higher than any potential income the farmer could make.

See, the company made it illegal for anyone else to purchase opium except for them, ensuring that they had a monopoly and could set the prices as low as they wanted.

Many peasants resisted the call to cultivate opium, but they were met with violence. There are numerous accounts of farmers being kidnapped for failing to grow opium.

Local landowners were complicit in the coercion of the lower class. The rural elite were able to collect higher rents from poppy growers. So they forced their landless tenants to grow poppy by threatening them with eviction. Without land, these peasants had no livelihood. So this metaphorical gun was loaded.

Ultimately, by hook and by crook, the East India Company coerced the villages to evolve into opium factories.

The consequences were devastating. Almost immediately, Bengal was struck by a famine. 10 million people died. After that, famines became frequent occurrences. Opium is not the only reason Bengal and Bihar were hit so hard by famine, but even a British Commissioner concluded that the most devastating famine was primarily caused by turning food crops into opium fields.

But no matter the consequences for South Asia, the British needed the Indian opium to fulfill an addiction of their own.

Their plan worked splendidly for a few years. The British East India Company shipped Indian opium to China, where merchants gladly paid silver for it. The company then used that silver to pay for Chinese tea that they brought back to London.

Their scheme worked so well that they didn't even need to send silver to buy tea anymore. Well, it worked well for the British, I should say.

Chapter Three

Opium had been used in China for centuries. Like in South Asia, the plant was mostly used for medicinal purposes.

But in the 17th century, the introduction of the tobacco pipe changed China's relationship with opium forever. The pipe, though originally made for tobacco, popularized the concept of smoking substances.

At first, folks in China smoked opium with tobacco. But at some point they abandoned the tobacco entirely, which made the opium extremely potent and addictive.

That said, opium was still a relative rarity, so prices remained high, which meant that the addiction problem mostly remained in the elite class.

Until the British got involved.

The first shipments of the East India Company's opium arrived on China's shores in 1781. Within just 25 years, opium exports from India quadrupled.

China was rolling in the drug, which drove prices down by 75%, making opium unfortunately accessible to all classes of people.

Drug addiction was now a public health crisis. So the Chinese emperor took a drastic measure at the very end of the 18th century and banned both the smoking of opium and the importing of the drug.

But instead of putting an end to the opium crisis, that just started a game of whack-a-mole between China and the British East India Company.

The British began working with smugglers to sell the opium for them. So then, the Chinese government increased policing presence at the port, which eradicated smuggling.

So THEN, the British were like, “Psych! We’re just gonna use another port.”

At this point in time, there were about 10 million opium smokers in China.

Beyond the public health crisis, the Chinese government was scared that they would lose their economic independence, which had been a source of pride for centuries.

So in 1839, the emperor appointed a special commissioner to crack down on opium. This commissioner was determined to rid China of its shameful addiction problem.

When the next ships arrived from India, he surrounded the European trading headquarters in Canton. He demanded they relinquish all of the opium on the ship and only then would he back down.

The commissioner got his hands on all 20,000 chests of opium. He ordered for it all to be destroyed with salt and lime and washed away into the Pacific.

The commissioner was sure this would be the final game ending whack. For good measure, he penned a letter to Queen Victoria to remind the sovereign of her morality.

This is what the letter said:

So long as you continue to make it and tempt the people of China to buy it, you will be showing yourselves careful of your own lives, but careless of the lives of other people, indifferent in your greed for gain to the harm you do to others; such conduct is repugnant to human feeling and at variance with the Way of Heaven.

The commissioner didn't end up sending the letter to Queen Victoria. Had she received the letter, perhaps she would’ve given second thought to the whole situation and realized the error in the British’s ways. Instead, she waged war.

The British government launched the first opium war in 1839 as retaliation for China having dared to confiscate their illegal opium.

The British ultimately won that war, but it scared them. At this point, it was more than just the British East India Company that was reliant on smuggling drugs into China. Economists estimate that one out of 10 British sterling pounds was tied up in the tea trade. And without the opium, they would not be able to afford the tea. In effect, the British Empire ran on tea and opium.

It's really not a great strategic move to have your entire economy rely on a foreign empire. The British needed to extricate themselves from China while still filling their endless tea habit.

Chapter Four

By the early 1800s, Britishers were drinking so much tea that it had become the national drink. In fact, tea became such a cultural institution that parliament passed a law mandating that the British East India Company always have an entire year's supply of tea on hand.

Tea was key to the British economy. So everyone was eager to find a way to gain control over the tea supply chain.

They didn't realize that tea isn't exclusively grown in China. Tea is indigenous to many regions of Asia. And in the case of India, it grew in Assam, the northeastern state that borders Bhutan and Burma.

But there, the tea plant was typically used for medicinal purposes. No one processed the plant into drinkable tea.

So the British didn't realize that tea was grown in Assam until the 1830s, when they conquered the state. They were thrilled. They had solved a piece of the puzzle. They had tea and a place to grow it. They just needed to know how to turn the leaves into liquid gold.

A high ranking official in the company had an idea. He knew that there were Chinese workers that had settled in Calcutta. He ordered for a train to bring those workers up to Assam so that they could teach the company how to make tea.

Those workers showed up and had no clue what was going on because it turned out they were actually carpenters and cobblers. Most of them had never even seen a tea plant before. I guess this official just kind of thought, like, "Oh, tea making is a genetic skill that all people from China just possess. They come out of the womb knowing how to make tea."

Who knows, but the next step in the company's roadmap was to bring in actual peasants from China who had made tea before.

They lured these Chinese peasants over to Assam. And by lure, I mean, they had to pay these women and men a ton to convince them to leave their otherwise satisfactory lives and migrate to South Asia.

But no amount of money could make up for the company’s deceit.

When these tea experts showed up to Assam, they were put on a forest and told, "Actually, before you can get to the tea making, we need you to do all of this extremely hard manual labor of deforestation, and then creating a tea plantation."

These Chinese peasants were very annoyed because they had clear contracts that said that they were coming to Assam to farm tea, not to create a plantation from scratch. Furthermore, they only wanted to work hours that they got paid for.

These peasants were very vocal with their displeasure about the situation and that upset the company. They were like, "We brought you here. You should be so grateful for a job. Just shut up, and work."

It further irked the company that these Chinese workers were getting sick all the time. See, they weren’t used to this entirely new climate and it’s not like the company was giving them healthcare. The company was just like, “Let’s cut our losses. We need to figure out a way to make tea ourselves so that we don’t have to deal with anyone from China.”

But there was only one man who could help them get there: Robert Fortune.

Chapter Five

Robert Fortune was born in Scotland in the early 19th century.

He was born into a poor family, and out of wedlock, so he should’ve become a farmer. But Robert was obsessed with plants.

He trained himself to become a botanist, which was a very respected position at the time. However, Robert's work experience wasn't considered as reputable as a degree. The only way he'd be able to compete with his wealthy and educated botanist peers would be to make a name for himself abroad.

At the age of 33, Robert boarded a ship to China. He spent nearly three years traveling across all of the mainland, gathering up as much knowledge as he could about exotic Chinese plants.

China had strict bans on Europeans traveling into the interior of the empire. The emperor had this crazy idea that the Europeans might come in and try to steal China’s resources.

But Robert decided that these rules didn’t really apply to him. He fancied himself a plant Democritus. He thought that everyone should have access to plants. He also was kind of prejudiced against Chinese people and their government, but that's a whole other story. He smuggled plants and seeds out of China to take back for research.

When Robert returned to England, he wrote a book about his adventures and boasted about his law breaking. His travel log caught the attention of the British East India Company. They were very impressed by Robert's flouting of the rules. They read his book and were like, "Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, that's our style. This guy gets us."

So in 1848, they sent Robert on a secret mission. Go back to China. And this time, steal not only tea plants, but also the secrets of tea production.

So to gain access to a tea factory, which was, again, barred from foreign visitors, Robert made up an entire cover story. He pretended to be a government official from a far away Chinese province who was interested in learning how tea was made.

To pull it off, he wore an elaborate disguise, including a fake mustache and a beard. He hired a Chinese translator who pretended to be his servant so that no one would have to hear him speak.

Historian Sarah Rose elaborated on the whole scheme in her book, For All the Tea in China. Here's an excerpt:

Proceeding into the otherwise empty courtyard, Fortune found fresh tea set to dry on large woven rattan plates, each the size of a kitchen table. The sun beat down on the containers, “cooking” the tea.

The sun-baked leaves were then taken to a furnace room and tossed into an enormous pan—what amounted to a very large iron wok.

The cooked leaves were then emptied onto a table… Four or five workers moved piles of them back and forth over bamboo rollers. They were rolled continuously to bring their essential oils to the surface… Then wrung out, their green juice pooling on the tables.

Robert couldn't scribble his notes fast enough, pausing only to direct his translator to ask a question or two. When he got back to his lodgings, Robert wrote out a letter filled with the secrets that the British had waged war over.

At last, the empire now had tea leaves. They had the expertise as to how to turn those leaves into a delicious drink. And they had the land in India to cultivate and process the tea. Now all they needed was labor.

Chapter Six

When it came to hiring laborers to work the tea plantations, the British started with the most logical approach: the local labor class in Assam. But like the Chinese peasants, the local tribes got fed up with the low wages that the company was doling out. And they similarly demanded that they should be able to have a day off once in a while.

Some workers stayed till they had earned enough cash for whatever they needed, whether that was a wedding or a loan repayment, and then bounced.

This was an entirely rational choice, given that the British were undervaluing this difficult work. But instead of recognizing that, the tea plantation owners concluded that, nope, it was the Assamese peasants and villagers who were lazy. Not only that, but they surmised that this laziness was inherent, that it had to do with race.

They decided they needed the good hardworking caste, not these lazy castes. They went to the hills of Central and Eastern India to recruit mostly tribal populations to work the tea plantations next. They specifically looked for remote areas that were nowhere near Assam so that the workers would be trapped.

Between 1870 and 1900, nearly 1 million women, children and men were transported to work the tea plantations in Assam.

Life for these indentured servants was bleak, difficult, and violent. As historian Jayeeta Sharma has written, “Indentured laborers' bodies were open to oppression in a way that earlier tea recruits were not. They were virtually imprisoned in squalor and locked in at night.

They were allowed little or no contact with local villagers. Flight was almost impossible due to their ignorance of the terrain, coupled with the hefty bounties offered to people to track any laborers who dared to run away.

There are countless records of floggings, beatings, and occasional killings of coolies.

Women were sexually exploited by Assam's white masters, and forced to bear their illegitimate children.

You might be wondering as I did, if conditions were this poor, why did the British even use the system of indentured servitude? Why not outright enslave people like they had done in other colonies? Well in 1833, the British Empire had officially banned slavery. Hence the need for indentured servitude. New name, similar conditions.

The abuses were so flagrant that the British Raj was forced to regulate the tea industry. They set a minimum wage and standards of care and insured for basic housing rights. It was easy for the government to pass those laws because they knew they wouldn't have to actually enforce them. They just needed to exist on paper for the human rights people.

Many of the workers, isolated from their families and friends, turned to alcohol. Alcoholism became so common that the British plantation owners began to worry about the addiction problem. Not because of the pain and suffering.

On one plantation, the Assam company angrily documented the individual cases.

[Note: the individual cases are muddled, but all of the following individuals were included]

August 19th, 1901. Bo Gly got drunk at sonari and fell into a drain. From this accident, he was unable to work until September 3rd.

August 19th, 1901. Thara got drunk at sonari and was unfit for work for six days.

September 8th, 1901. Rossana was admitted into hospital for injuries inflicted by her husband. She was ill 10 days.

September 8th, 1901. Haru got drunk at sonari and got into a quarrel. He received a large incise to scalp wound.

September 29th, 1901. Bundia was admitted to hospital for an injury to knee joint inflicted by her husband while drunk. She was off work 14 days.

October 21st, 1901. Harua was admitted to hospital having been assaulted when drunk. He was unfit for work for seven days.

December 15th, 1901. Ganga off work two days from drunkenness.

December 15th, 1901. Moncton was admitted to hospital having been assaulted badly by her drunken husband. She was discharged after seven days.

These labor shortages were so common that the British had to start recruiting workers from new villages and states across the subcontinent.

Despite the high turnover, growing tea was bringing in profits the British had only ever once dreamed of. The Indian tea market officially outgrew tea supply in 1889. This was the first time in world history that there was a state that was producing more tea than China.

Every month, millions of kilograms of tea were sent from India across the globe. Yet, very few Indians consumed the tea themselves. Because even in 1889, chai was still not a thing.

But that would all soon change.

Chapter Seven

So quick recap, the British demand for tea had led to famines in Bengal, opium addiction in China, and labor injustices and cruelty in Assam. But after two centuries, the British had finally done it. They'd figured out a way to grow tea all by themselves and surpass China as the world's primary tea supplier. But they weren't satisfied. At the turn of the 20th century, they decided they had a new problem they wanted to solve. They were now producing more tea than the world needed.

I learned in my high school econ class that when supply exceeds demand, that drives prices down. But the British didn't want to cut into their profits.

They decided that instead, they should drive up demand to meet their supply.

In 1901, the Viceroy of India commissioned an experiment to introduce tea to people in different regions of the sub-continent. But South Asians just weren't interested in trying out the drink, which they associated with foreigners. They much preferred beverages like sharbat, which had been part of Desi culture for many centuries.

The only Indians interested in tea were educated elite who had grown accustomed to it while attending university abroad. Or those working in the British Raj who wanted to be associated with Europeans and whiteness.

The British may have given up entirely on trying to create widespread Indian demand if not for the Great Depression.

People no longer had disposable income for the luxury of tea. All of a sudden, the British had over 100 million pounds of excess tea that they couldn't sell to their normal buyers.

So now it was imperative to find a way to convince the 300 million people of British India to change their ways and become fans of tea. The government founded the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board and it had one simple mandate: market the heck out of tea to Indians.

These guys went all out. They ran ads in newspapers extolling the health benefits of tea. They put up placards in train stations with instructions of how to brew tea. They set up tea demos at marketplaces and festivals to give people a taste of tea. And their marketing efforts weren't just limited to urban areas. They put together a road show to introduce tea to remote villages.

I do appreciate their commitment to showmanship. When they were out doing these road shows, they outfitted the vans with huge tea kettles so that they would become this spectacle.

Beyond regional diversity, the Tea Board needed to reach all religions, classes, and castes. They created ad campaigns in vernacular languages and commissioned custom artwork that would speak to specific subsets of the population. For example, they made different ads for different classes of women.

The aristocratic woman who was serving tea at a kitty party. The middle-class mother who cared about her family's health and that's why she decided to start making tea. And of course, the loyal housewife, dutifully pouring her husband a cup of tea after work.

As tea started gaining steam across the sub-continent, Desi people started experimenting to see how they could make the beverage fit their needs. That's really when masala chai was born. And by that, I mean the drink that's made by boiling tea leaves with milk, sugar, and spices.

There were two reasons that Desis turned boring tea into spicy chai. One was a matter of taste and two was a matter of cost. With the milk and the extra ingredients, people didn't need as many tea leaves to make chai, which made the drink much more affordable.

From the very beginning, there’s always been more than one type of chai. In the south, pepper vines grow freely. So chai on the Malabar coast included peppercorns. In Assam, the tea workers added salt to their chai to replenish lost electrolytes.

Now that masala chai is soooo popular, I wouldn't doubt that some people would just try to credit the British with the creation of chai. But we know that it was very much a Desi invention. There is documented evidence of British people at the time being horrified that Indians weren't making tea the "correct" way. But they swallowed their disgust because it looked like masala chai might just save the Empire's economy.

Until the pesky nationalists got in their way, that is.

Chapter Eight

Prafulla Chandra Ray was a Bengali scientist and entrepreneur born in 1861. Ray was originally from an area that is in today's Bangladesh.

His parents were landowners and his grandfather had served for the British East India Company. So he had it pretty good. And yet, that didn't stop him from seeing the faults of empire. Perhaps it was because he was a kid during the Indian rebellion of 1857. Or maybe it's because he had heard about the devastating famines of his parents' and grandparents' generations.

Either way, Ray began speaking truth to power right from the get-go. At the age of 21, he sailed to Britain to attend the University of Edinburgh on a scholarship. While he was there, he wrote an essay heavily criticizing the British Empire and its rule over the sub-continent. His essay was so well written and so well argued that it was published all over Britain.

When Ray returned to the sub-continent, chemistry degree in hand, he began teaching at a prestigious university in Calcutta. He did so until he was able to save up enough money to pursue his dream.

One of the things that bothered Ray most about the British Raj was how excellent the system was at incentivizing South Asians to become complicit actors. People like his grandfather in some ways felt like they had to serve the British in order to obtain upward mobility.

He wanted to create a way for Desis to rise up to the middle-class without having to work for the British government. He spent his entire life savings to found India's first pharmaceutical company. Ray was extremely successful, so you’d think he could just kind of rest on his laurels at that point.

But when he saw the British were trying to promote tea within the sub-continent, he was furious. He'd seen firsthand the destruction that Britain's unquenchable thirst for tea had caused in his homeland of Bengal.

Ray was determined to prevent the rise of tea among his people. He began publishing political cartoons in the local newspapers about the perils of tea. These cartoons equated tea with poison, and side note, yeah, this guy apparently was an entrepreneur, an unparalleled scientist, and an artist.

Ray was just one of many activists campaigning against tea. In the 1920s, workers on the tea plantations in Assam began taking collective action to protest the inhumane living and working conditions. Thousands of workers went on strike and nationalist newspapers urged their readers to boycott tea.

Their messaging was very powerful. But the British tea industry had money on its side. They began a direct antagonistic campaign in which they started calling tea "swadeshi," meaning native. That's right, they co-opted the language of the nationalists. The tea industry actually started talking about how tea was a tool for women's empowerment, that it was the progressive choice because tea had the power to unite all different castes and classes.

Their ads explicitly argued that since tea was grown in India and processed by Indians, the most patriotic thing an Indian could do was drink tea.

Conclusion

Between the tea industry's aggressive marketing campaign and the invention of masala chai, tea drinking in India picked up dramatically in the 1930s. By the 1960s, the fate of chai was sealed. Indians had discovered a new way of processing tea -- the crush, tear, curl method-- which made it even cheaper and more accessible. It became the working class drink.

Today, India is both the largest producer and biggest consumer of tea in the world. One could argue that, as South Asians, we have reclaimed chai from its violent past and turned it into a symbol of cultural pride. In other words, we turned bitter tea into sweet, milky chai.

But to think that chai's dark history is no longer its present would be a mistake.

Tea plantation owners in India are obliged by law to provide and maintain adequate houses and sanitary toilets for workers. But this woman shares her small house with six other people and hasn't had a working toilet for 36 years. She told us she has no choice but to go in the tea bushes. And it's not just the toilets that are broken.

We were shown houses in terrible condition with leaking roofs and cracked walls. These are some of the homes provided for workers by the biggest tea grower in the world. A company called McCloud Russell. It's estates in Assam supply some of the world's favorite brands, including Lipton's, PG Tips, and Tetly,

Epilogue

We didn't tell you this story to make you feel bad about drinking chai or think that chai is any less Desi than it is. This story is a reminder that culture is constantly shifting, and the whole reason we study history is to better understand our present reality.

Just like how episode 1 of Misrepresented was about some silly scandal in 1911, but it was also a story about how we misunderstand Empire today.

The Myth of the Pink City followed the rule of a sly dynasty, which helped explain why some myths remain so powerful hundreds of years later.

Another episode was about one man's role in the fall of an empire, and showed how tempting it is to simplify complex histories through the lens of religion.

And that brings us to Chai Lies, the final episode of our series.

I want to thank you so much for tuning in. You joined listeners all across the world, and because of all of you, we climbed the history charts in India, Pakistan, Kenya, Singapore, Australia, and the UK.

This isn’t the end. We do plan on producing a season two, but we need your help to do so. Can you chip in $15? It will allow us to hire a researcher to help uncover more stories. You can Venmo us @kahaani or give on our website at kahaani.io.

If you can't give us any money right now, you can sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Instagram so that you can learn about other opportunities to support the podcast.

This episode was produced by me, Niki Aggarwal, with sound design done by Hanisha Harjani, research assistance was given by Ranvijay Singh, fact checking was done by Abhishta Tantry and Delilah Righter. The cover art for our show was designed by Suraj Venkataram. Our accompanying teachers' guides are produced by Nishi Crook and marketing for the show was done by Priya Phagu

Kahaani was founded to widen the historical narrative. This podcast is just one of the ways in which we're doing that. To learn more about all of the other projects we have brewing, visit our website, kahaani.io. Goodbye for now.