Meet India's organic tea king

DARJEELING, West Bengal — Swaraj Kumar “Rajah” Banerjee swept into his office wearing the khaki-colored, Raj-era planter's uniform that he has made his signature style since the 1980s. The outfit gives him an air that is at once aristocratic and vaguely military — and hints at a genius for marketing that has made him the driving force behind the organic movement on Darjeeling's famous tea plantations.

A London playboy of sorts in his 20s, Banerjee was lured back to India in 1970 by the promise of a colonial lord's idyll of riding and shooting on the family tea estate an hour's drive from Darjeeling. But when he was thrown from his horse, he had an experience that he describes as transcendent.

“Before I hit the ground, I had an out-of-body experience,” Banerjee tells me, deadpan. “I went to that zone where the soul goes when we cross over to another frequency — there is no death. And there was this beautiful cadenzas — light, music, no pathos, but melancholic — and the trees connected and transmitted this ululating chant, 'Save us, save us.'”

That evening, he told his parents he was moving back to the tea garden for good.

“They were delighted for the wrong reasons, and I was not going to tell them what I'd experienced earlier, because I'd have been certified insane,” Banerjee recalls. “But I knew I had to stay and bring the trees back. The voyage began then.”

Long before the organic movement took hold here, his mystical experience began to translate into monetary gains, both for the plantation and for its workers. To convert the tea estate to compost-based fertilizers, Banerjee created financial incentives for the tea workers to raise cattle and spread manure over the plantation's 550 acres of tea plants, and encouraged each household to raise five varieties of indigenous trees that he later purchased and used to reforest depleted areas of his land. The result is that today Makaibari has 1,070 acres of forest — including 300 acres of sub-tropical rain forest that are more than a thousand years old and play host to a greater variety of wildlife than many of India's national parks.

“His organics was a deeper organics than a lot of estates that would just follow the rules,” said Joseph Smilley, an organic certification expert with San Diego-based Quality Assurance International. “He created whole permaculture systems that allowed the people of the estate to benefit as well.”

Since earning organic certification in 1988, Banerjee has also built a biogas facility to convert surplus manure to cooking gas, a move that has stopped plantation workers from stripping the forests for their cook fires and also reduced indoor air pollution — which the World Health Organization estimates causes 1.6 million deaths a year worldwide, primarily among children and women. Meanwhile, though using organic methods costs as much as eight times more than using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the higher prices that the premium organic tea commands on the market — together with tea tourism and other initiatives — make up most of the difference. Makaibari's “single estate” tea has sold for world record prices at international auctions, for upwards of $400 a kilogram.

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