Indian Tea, Postcolonial Governance, and the Uses of Transparency

This chapter examines fifty years of state-led industrial reform in the Indian tea industry with an eye to how, where, and by whom notions of transparency were deployed and contested. For nearly 100 years, from the mid 1800s to Indian independence in 1947, tea was produced in India and shipped to London for valuation, auctioning, blending, and consumption. In the early 1950s, India’s new independent bureaucracy worked to make visible the workings of the colonial tea industry. They expanded India’s tea auction infrastructure, including the storage and transportation of tea. Central to this challenge to the opacity of colonial governance was the establishment of small, governable regional auction centers across India. By the end of the twentieth century, however, these regional auction centers had come to be seen by Indian bureaucrats and regulators as sites of invisible, corrupt dealings. This chapter, then, juxtaposes post-independence reforms of the 1950s with more recent attempts to re-spatialize the tea trade: to move it out of regional auction centers and onto a nationwide trading platform, all in the name of transparency.