The perfect start to my day is a good cup of tea, or what Keralites call chaaya. Enough milk, but not too milky, two full teaspoons of Indian tea powder to make it strong and flavourful, and just one teaspoon sugar. My evening tea is usually the same recipe but with the addition of crushed ginger and cardamom. The secret to a tasty glass of chaaya is when you pour it from glass to glass to make the concoction frothy. Three to four times should do it.
Gathering around to chat and catch up with each other’s lives while having tea was something my friends and I enjoyed doing during our Mumbai stint. Tea is not just my favourite drink. It is a concoction popular around the globe. Along my years in several cities, I have indulged in varieties of black tea as well, in addition to my favourite milky libation. There is the regular no-frill kattan, the good old sulaimaani, the varied goodness that comes in tea bags- green, ginger, lemon, lemon and ginger, green tea, hibiscus tea, earl grey, and the latest one, the rooibos. I find the no-milk ones better when they are lighter and golden.
The cornucopia of interesting facts about tea begins from the etymology itself. The world can be broadly divided into regions that use versions of chai, thee, and other unrelated words for tea. WALS online has a chapter on tea describing its etymological origins and demonstrating the distribution of cha vs thee in the world map. The difference between the vocabulary items cha and thee originates from the varieties of Chinese spoken in different trading routes.
A long, long time ago, China had been the original exporter of tea. The Portuguese were one of the first Europeans to enter into tea trade with China. They bought their tea from the Cantonese speaking Macau and Hong Kong, where the term for tea is cha. The Portuguese carried the term cha to Portugal and their colonies beyond. Also, from China via land, the word cha spread to Tibet, Mongolia, Central Asia, Iran, and Eastern Europe. On the other hand, the Dutch obtained their tea from Amoy in Fujian where thee was the vocabulary item for tea, which spread across Europe, including Britain and other colonies.
However, what is interesting is that Malayalam, the state language of Kerala, has both the forms, cha and thee, used in restrictive and exclusive environments. Kerala is, possibly, the only place where both words exist. The Malayalam word theeyila/thee-ila means ‘tea-leaf’ and the phonologically accommodated form chaaya refers to the concoction, usually milk tea. Black tea is referred to as kaʈʈan chaaya (short form kaʈʈan) meaning 'strong or dark tea'. Referring to the drink as chaaya is taking a turn away from its sister language Tamil, where the term for tea is thee-niir which means ‘tea-essence’. So the tea thickens! Isn’t it intriguing that Malayalam has the word chaaya while Tamil does not have it?
WALS online puts Kerala in the cha territory in the linguistic map along with other North-Indian states. There is no mention of the use of thee in Kerala. The True History of Tea suggests that the word chai came to India from Persian through Mughals. But that is highly unlikely in Kerala’s case because Kerala was sort of untouched by the Mughal influence. The explanation for this linguistic quirk lies in Kerala’s colonial past.
Once upon a time, Kerala was a Portuguese colony. The Portuguese have been instrumental in introducing Malayalis to a lot of things ever since Vasco da Gama arrived at the coast of Kerala. The images of native Malayalis marvelling at the sight of an almirah or a borma (baking oven), sipping fermented grapes in the olden times and so on, can be easily imagined. Although Keralites were already familiar with drinking water with herbs boiled in it, the taste of tea leaves must have been an exotic one. Malayalam has a lot of Portuguese loan words and thus, the word chaaya must have come from the Portuguese chaa.
There are different accounts that suggest theeyila as a Portuguese loan word as well. However, this etymological association is counter-intuitive since Portuguese does not have the word thee. I assume this misconception to have stemmed from the fact that it was the Portuguese who had introduced tea to Keralites.
Whereas at a later point during the colonial times, the British started the cultivation of tea in Kerala giving rise to the scenic and sprawling tea plantations. It was probably then did Keralites start referring to tea-leaf as thee-ila. Thus, the leaf is associated with the word thee and the brew with cha. Kerala has come a long way from those colonial times when tea was just an exotic drink. Tea is an inevitable part of the state’s culture now. The existence of two different words points towards two separate threads in Kerala’s colonial past. Something to think about while enjoying a good cup of tea.