For Dr. Shweta Ghosh, tea wasn't just a beloved necessity to start her day with. It was also something that she loved enough to explore deeper about its social, cultural, and political history. Wanting to see tea through an anthropological lens, Ghosh set out across the country to capture the essence of tea and its making, right from the tea gardens to the tapris and Irani cafes.
For two months, Ghosh tried to gain as much background knowledge as she could about tea: from reading books and going through archival records to falling back on oral histories, having conversations, and posting questions on the then Facebook. She chose to go as wide with her research as she could before she found an angle to go deep into, something that took a large chunk of her time. Finally, after connecting with a chef from the Institute of Hotel Management, Aurangabad, who led her to a library, it was all a chain reaction of finding other people she needed for the project.
The next one month was spent travelling to places like Gujarat, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Thiruvananthapuram and capturing the diversity of tea and its preparations and talking to a range of people, almost as wide as the variations of tea she got to drink- from the salted tea of Kashmir to the Butter tea of Kerala. However, Ghosh's motive was not to show a catalogue of the tea in India but to show the aspects of caste, class, and gender that came with it. She wanted to talk about not just the beverage but also the environment and the relationships it created.
At the end of her shoot, Ghosh had around 1TB of raw footage that she had in total. After two rounds of feedback, fighting for her vision for the film and an intense time at the editing desk where a lot of elements were got rid of, her final product of 52 minutes came about. A lot of the content she took did not make it to the final cut- be it the mini 15-minute interviews of numerous people or the visually aesthetic shots of the tea gardens and the preparation of tea. “Cinematography is not about pretty shots, it is more about showing what you want to say.”. She knew what message she wanted to put out via this film and she was determined to not let it get diluted.
She believes there are three times a documentary is written: The initial idea post research, the first shooting, and then finally connecting all dots and filling gaps. Ghosh decided to fill these gaps with songs that fit or other pieces of media or little interviews she had taken. While all of it did work out well for the film, unfortunately, she could not get copyright permissions to use certain pieces of media in her work. She did choose to still go ahead and use the pieces while repeatedly acknowledging the fact that those were not her works and crediting the due owners, now, six years later, she does not recommend it because it had other repercussions of those parts having to be cut out when telecasted. Thus taking out the little pieces that tied things together made it a more enjoyable watch.
Having to travel to different parts of the country, Ghosh faced language and cultural barriers too. In Kerala, she could not conduct the interview with the tea stall owner herself and had a translator for the job. This in turn affected the way the interview was taken because while some things got lost in translation, a lot of the free-flowing deep conversation could not be possible. Another difficulty was dealing with changes in the people she wanted to talk to for the film: While with some the conversations felt very filtered, with others, the conversations didn't happen since they dropped out. Dr. Bhadra, who spoke at length about the history of tea since the colonisation, got on board at the very last minute when Ghosh decided to make a phone call to him, after getting no response to her emails. However, her favourite character in the film, Yaseen Sahab from Hyderabad, was someone she came across through word of mouth when a senior of hers told her about their grandfather and him being an ardent tea lover.
By the end of the project, Ghosh had learnt a handful of lessons in addition to the many types of teas. Be it professional lessons about knowing when to stop investigating and shooting and submitting a cut, or life lessons about digging her heels in for the vision she had and seeing it through. Being passionate about something to dive deeper into it, determined enough to travel the lengths of the country to investigate and put out a message while having lots of tea in the process, is quite the roller coaster to be on for six months, but Ghosh ended it with a delight.
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