Steeped and Stirred is a 2016 documentary by Dr. Shweta Gosh produced by Public Service Broadcasting Trust. To sum this film up, Caroline Kramer does quite a decent job at the beginning of the film. “Tea is everything. It is a comment and a distraction. It is an activity and a love affair.”
This film is about people’s love for tea. It’s not just a beverage. Well, it is but it’s also so much more. It’s so fascinating to see how there is an entire gamut of things that come under this beloved beverage. It’s not just a drink you gulp down before going to work as your daily dose of caffeine. For some, it’s a ritual, not for the caffeine but simply for the taste, and for some, it’s a treat they give themselves. There are multiple ways one can prepare their tea, and as you go further away from one region to another, the ways in which one can make tea just keeps on getting more diverse. Who knew there was a kind of tea served with sliced tomato and salt? There’s white tea, masala chai, green tea, tea made with ginger, tea with salt, butter tea, and the list just keeps going on. And through all of this, people somehow always find ways to make it personal. Some have their tea with just a dollop of cream, some have Lipton tea with sugar and salt, some with very little tea and a little too much of milk, some prefer tea only with Parle G biscuits whereas some can’t even fathom the thought of tainting their tea with anything.
There are a lot of themes shown in the film which are touched upon when it comes to tea. Patriarchy is one of the prominent things which always seem to hang around when it comes to drinking tea. There’s always the grand event where the boy visits the girl’s house and she has to dress up like a doll and serve tea to everyone and thus making an image of herself, kind of like a hey-I’ll-serve-tea-now-and-after-marriage-I’ll-feed-you-all image. It’s funny how a normal beverage can turn out to be so gendered in nature. The most popular and easily found place where you can get a cup of India’s favourite masala chai is a tapri. And although men and women both drink tea, as voraciously as the other, you’ll very seldom find a woman blowing away at a steaming cup of masala chai at a tapri. When asked, women often respond with how it’s uncomfortable and feels unsafe to stand around random men drinking tea. Dalit people have it even worse. That’s where caste and poverty come in. Dalits, when they go to work at higher caste family homes, they always have a tattered metal vessel designated to themselves, and that tattered metal vessel is never placed with the other utensils that the family uses. And thus, though untouchability is abolished it still prevails in these little ways.
There’s plenty of passion in the film about tea but that’s not the only reason people turn to it. For some, tea isn’t special because it makes a great beverage, it’s special because it sells. Tea serves as a source of income for a huge number of people. Tea is business for some and for some it’s a break from a long day. Even though it is a refreshing beverage for some it's an addiction to others. A man responds with how if he doesn’t get his tea between 6:45 to 7 in the morning, he simply doesn’t have it then. Syed Bilal Yasni, on the other hand though, absolutely adores talking about tea and could do so for hours.
Let’s be honest, the first thought that pops into your mind when you hear the word tea is either a piping hot cup of tea on a rainy day or the queen drinking tea in a fine bone china teacup with her pinky sticking out. There’s no in-between. But this film doesn’t romanticise tea in the slightest. It shows it in all its tainted glory. The frequent close-up long shots of the tea being prepared set a soothing tone, almost as if it’s what should be expected from the act of having a nice cup of tea. The little segments of media with Doris Day’s Tea For Two is quite a fun addition to the film and makes it more lively.
Who would’ve thought that you’d get to see a documentary on tea? Well, there you have it. Courtesy of Dr. Shweta Ghosh. Coffee lovers, y’all really need to step up your game.
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