The word ‘tea’, common to most European languages, is from the dialect of Amoy, from where much of Britain’s tea was shipped; but those who got their tea from Canton, like the Portuguese, and overland, like the Indians and the Arabs, call it by the Cantonese word ‘cha’. Almost every Indian language uses a variant of ‘cha’, including ‘chai’ and ‘chaya’; it is only the Anglophone Indians who speak of ‘tea’. But before I end this section on tea, a small digression. Even as they gave us tea, the British were destroying something else. The British ruthlessly exploited the land for profit, while
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