Chai Time? Colonial Entanglements of Labor and Leisure from Tea plantations to Kitchen
Words by Avani Ashtekar
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Chai Time? Colonial Entanglements of Labor and Leisure from Tea Plantations to Kitchen by Avani Ashtekar
Thappad (2020), a Bollywood film that received much attention from Indian feminist collectives for its otherwise poor interrogation of misogyny, shows Amu – the protagonist – sharing an interesting relationship with chai. Amu wakes up every morning, picks up two pints of milk from the doorstep, snips a couple of blades of lemongrass from a kitchen plant, turns on the burner, sets water to boil, and adds the lemongrass, ginger, sugar, and tea granules to the bubbling water before pouring it into her cup. She sips her tea slowly while watering the plants and catching up on a conversation with her neighbour. After she finishes her cup, she trays the tea, milk, and sugar to finally set it on her husband’s side table, to whom she gently wakes up and hands the cup of steaming hot chai. She makes chai every morning like this – for herself and him. Every morning. Every morning.
Amu’s gendered physical labor of making sure to wake up on time and make chai every day and the emotional labor of caring for her partner – like many other women – remains unacknowledged in the film. At the same time, her chai time is one of the only times in the film where Amu is shown taking out time to do something with and for herself.
What might the profound notion of time have to do with such a mundane beverage, namely, chai? Would differentiating between the two seemingly perennially interrelated things: time and chai, offer any alternative stories of the labor involved in chai’s production and the leisure in its consumption, even when the two are so diffused in every sip? In other words, is there a relation between the time women take to make chai for everyone and their own chai time? What other forms of labor have preceded the joy of leisurely sipping on a garam chai ki pyali?
Chai and its relationship with time has been long, layered, and of course, liquid, for it has been hard to pin down. And yet, like many other histories, the interwoven story of chai and time finds its roots in colonialism.