“Jaago re! Wake up!” This is the slogan at the center of the marketing of Tata Tea’s signature middle-class beverage, Tata Gold. In the run-up to the Indian general elections in 2014, Tata Gold was relaunched as the official beverage of Indian women’s empowerment. “Tata Gold has 15 percent long leaves,” Tata product marketing proclaimed. These leaves “open up and release a superior aroma. Just like the leaves that open, the campaign … seeks to open minds to the power that the women of India have, to bring about the change they desire.”Footnote ¹

A 2013–2014 Tata Gold advertising campaign, entitled the “Power of 49,” featured a series of videos “giving a voice to the women of India to be heard in the political discourse of our country.”Footnote ² One video was of a conversation between a young politician and his wife. She says that, with the elections around the corner, he will be busy. He nods in agreement, without really listening, and continues working. She gets visibly frustrated and tells him to go and make her a cup of tea. He rips open a plastic packet of Tata Gold. We cut to a detailed shot of the tea leaves unfurling as the water comes to a boil.

“Look at the tea leaves opening,” she tells him. There is a dramatic pause, then she asks: “Has your mind also opened?” She explains that, while he might ignore her, he cannot afford to ignore India’s women, who account for 49 percent of the voter base. The politician takes a whiff of the tea and visibly awakens from his indifference. Thanks to Tata Gold, his mind has opened. This public figure now sees the public differently.

The tea cup the politician sips from – a delicate, transparent, glass one – is a deliberate juxtaposition to the heavy, Tata-branded, green ceramic mug that viewers normally see in Tata Tea ads. That mug is itself juxtaposed with the earthenware or stainless steel cups associated with lower-class Indian tea drinkers. The material appearance and sensory qualities of Tata Gold, with its long tea leaves and light color, signal ideas about middle-class refinement as well as political and economic transparency.

Transparency, or the ability to see what might otherwise be obfuscated or taken as the normative order of things, as many scholars working in India have argued, is often deployed as both conceptual foil and antidote to corruption (Mathur Reference Mathur2012; Mazzarella Reference Mazzarella2006; Sharma Reference Sharma2013; see also Gupta Reference Gupta2005). At the time of writing, three general elections have passed since the rollout of Tata’s ad. The political landscape has changed, especially in India’s tea-producing regions. An appeal to anti-corruption and anti-establishment politics undergirded the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise to power in 2014. The rhetoric of transparency and unveiling continues to animate Hindutva populism across the subcontinent. Transparency, then, is anything but a marketing ploy.

The story of “Jaago Re” is just one of many moments since India’s independence in 1947 in which the tea industry has been questioned, reaffirmed, and recalibrated, along with tea’s place in the country’s agricultural and economic future. Once an elite beverage reserved primarily for export, tea is now firmly part of the Indian national imaginary. The humble, affordable cup of chai is a central feature of both private and public spaces – from village homes to fancy urban hotels – across the subcontinent (Lutgendorf Reference Lutgendorf2012). At some symbolic level, tea unites Indians of all classes and regions. It is drunk out of clay cups in dusty bazaars, in shiny office buildings, and in newfangled urban corporate café chains aimed at the upper-middle class.

As a testament to the creep of tea into the national imaginary as commodified patrimony, India’s current prime minister from the Hindu-right BJP party, Narendra Modi, explicitly portrays himself as the son of a railway station chai-walla (tea seller). Tea in the current political zeitgeist in India has even become somewhat sacrosanct. Modi’s tea shop in the state of Gujarat is being turned into a monument. In the run-up to the 2021 elections in India, Modi even publicly disparaged Greta Thunberg’s commentary on and promotion of the Indian farmers’ protest toolkit. Thunberg called for a “disrupt[ion of] the yoga and chai image of India” as a means of drawing attention to the plight of the country’s farmers. Modi responded by decrying her comments as part of a larger “conspiracy to malign Indian tea.” Activists such as Thunberg, Modi lamented, have “stooped so low that they are not sparing even Indian tea.”Footnote ³

But tea’s symbolic place in Indian life is relatively new. Certainly, tea has been produced in India since the 1830s. Tea’s conversion from an exploitative colonial export crop to a national symbol came thanks to a series of efforts by the postcolonial Indian state to make tea and the industry around it more visible and accessible to political and bureaucratic scrutiny. When India gained independence in 1947, government officials sought to exert regulatory control over the tea industry. For decades, British plantation owners, brokerage firms, and other private industry actors had largely governed themselves. They had actively sought to ensure autonomy from colonial agriculture and land bureaucracies. Ensuring a successful transition to independence required making the Indian tea industry’s previously opaque operations visible. It required bringing tea production more firmly into state practice.

Tea as a national beverage, of course, comes from somewhere. The tea that Modi and his father sold on a railway platform in rural India and the tea offered in high-end urban retailers all originate from colonially rooted plantations in India’s northeast and southern regions.

In this chapter, I suggest that to understand programs to make colonial crops such as tea sit comfortably with state practice – and particularly with calls for “transparency” (market, political, or otherwise), ethical production, or even Hindu nationalism – it is necessary to situate them in longer, often state-led, regulatory histories. This story of a state’s attempt to “see” – and govern – what was happening within its borders differs from the well-known picture of mid twentieth-century state optics painted by James Scott (Reference Scott1999) in his Seeing Like a State. Independent India’s early attempts to make visible the workings of a colonially rooted tea industry were not undertaken in the name of managing and improving the lives of newly enfranchised Indian citizens through heavy-handed socio-ecological transformation. Rather, regulation through visibility – an aim for a kind of transparency on the part of the state – unfolded as part of the project of decolonization and independent nation-building. Since Indians had been systematically excluded from the workings of the tea industry throughout colonial rule, Indian regulators saw it as essential to open what had until 1947 been an economic black box. Since India’s independence from Britain in 1947, ideas of openness have dominated the state’s attempts to regulate the tea trade.

Despite the rise of right-wing political populism in India and beyond, talk of transparency in contemporary capitalism and democratic political life has tended to foreground the efforts of nongovernmental actors to bear witness to the processes of commodity circulation and governance. Such actors push to make the actions of capital and the state not just visible, but immediately visible, anywhere and at any time. Transparency projects aim to make spatial and temporal distance less of an obstacle to efficient trade and equitable governance. Nongovernmental agricultural certification schemes are one prominent institutional instrument for achieving transparency. The term of art in commodity circulation programs oriented toward transparency, such as fair trade, is “direct trade.” These third-party certifiers act as independent auditors who evaluate production practices against a set of standards abstracted from geographic, ecological, or cultural specificities (see Strathern Reference Strathern2000). In addition to auditing, agricultural certification programs like fair trade or organic, along with supply chain integrity projects such as the UTZ or Ethical Tea Partnership, frequently focus on promoting direct trading relations. They herald the elimination of intermediaries between plantations and buyers as means of hedging against corruption, price-fixing, and labor abuses. As a concept, non-state-fostered transparency in trade gestures to an opening to greater, more democratic participation; to greater public visibility; and to more abundant and accessible information.

These nongovernmental actors set themselves up against states and their byzantine regulations, tendency toward corruption, or supposed disinterest in the qualities of trade and governance. But the history of India’s experience with tea complicates this neat distinction. Whereas transparency amounts to a push for immediacy and a compression of spatial and temporal distance, the postcolonial project of industrial opening of Indian tea aspired to maintain the state’s regulatory position as spatially and temporally between consumers and producers.

I first discuss post-independence reforms to the tea industry in the early to mid 1950s, led by a newly formed government regulatory agency, the Tea Board of India (TBI). To assert sovereignty over an industry still dominated by British capital, TBI regulators set out to study and make visible the material infrastructure of tea warehousing, shipping, and sales. By exerting state oversight over this infrastructure, regulators believed, India could stake a stronger claim to tea’s profits. The TBI’s Auctions Enquiry Commission set into motion several reforms that vastly expanded trade infrastructure in India. Importantly, the Commission created seven auction centers in India’s tea-growing regions. The TBI’s regulatory aspirations were met with what can best be described as paternalistic resistance by the Indian Tea Association (ITA), the trade association that represented British tea interests after independence and was the pre-independence regulator of the industry. ITA members still operated the most lucrative tea plantations in the country. The ITA insisted that the TBI’s plan to move more auctions to cities such as Calcutta and Cochin would hamper “free trade.” Visibility – the ability to see tea and trace its movement – was central to the ITA’s conception of free trade. If auctions were moved to India, this would limit the ability of Indian tea’s primary customers – buyers and blenders in the UK – to see, touch, taste, and smell tea before they purchased it.

In the second part of the chapter, I describe the state’s efforts, which came to fruition in 2016, to convert the seven auction centers established in the decades after independence into a single, pan-India tea auction. By the early 2000s, the TBI was concerned about the stagnation – and potential corruption – of the market for Indian tea. The TBI blamed the decentralized auction system that Indian regulators had established in the 1950s for this corruption. By the 2000s, regulators had come to believe that a single, digitally mediated auction would allow wider participation and ensure transparent, free trade.

Post-Independence Reform

Ideas about transparency and opacity, as both material and metaphor, can be traced to the Enlightenment, when refined instruments allowed scientists not only to know nature, but also to represent that knowledge to others in new ways. Historian of science Theresa Levitt (Reference Levitt2009) describes the scientific work and political engagement of scientists in post-Enlightenment France. Describing the preceding years, she writes, “The Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century had in large part been built around the project of expanding visibility. The world was seen as eminently legible, if only one were looking correctly” (Levitt Reference Levitt2009: 2). Telescopes and microscopes were tools for looking correctly. Things that appeared unknowable or impenetrable were disaggregated. This was a period of “optical revolution,” but in the late 1700s and early 1800s, a new instrument came into use: the polarimeter. Capable of measuring the polarization of light, the polarimeter shifted the terrain of scientific inquiry. As Levitt explains, “Instead of rendering visible things that were too far away or too small to be seen, it gave form precisely to what the naked eye could not see” (ibid.). But scientists disagreed about what was actually being seen. Transparency, it turned out, was an open conceptual and material field. Scientific instruments – as well as the print media that circulated news of the effects of these instruments – revealed the inner workings and composition of things to a greater public, but they also raised new questions about what might (still) remain unseen. The work of transparency, then, can thus bring about a kind of rupture, a recalibration of thought about everyday materials and even thought itself.

In the years after Indian independence in 1947, the Indian government created multiple commissions composed of bureaucratic and techno-scientific experts to look inside the tea industry – to unmask its hidden economic structure. Enacted under the Nehruvian socialist vision for the independent nation, these commissions resulted in some clear social reforms, including new labor and housing standards as well as the encouragement of Indian “rupee companies” to join the tea trade and compete with British “sterling companies” (see Besky Reference Besky2017; Reference Besky2020). At no point, however, did the government consider eliminating, nationalizing, or otherwise radically reforming the plantation-based tea industry. Its strategy from the start was to make tea and the infrastructure that brought it to market more Indian, not to undo them. As a first step, in the early 1950s, the government of India rolled out a large-scale grassroots marketing campaign to persuade Indian consumers – rich and poor alike – to drink Indian tea (see Bhadra Reference Bhadra2005). The consumption of Indian tea would benefit the nation by stimulating agricultural production, providing employment for independent retailers, and ensuring greater productivity in mills, factories, and fields across the country. The government sought to transform the drink of colonial occupation into a “swadeshi” drink (Lutgendorf Reference Lutgendorf2012).Footnote ⁴

The TBI launched the Auctions Enquiry Commission at the end of 1954. The purpose of the Commission was to understand why, although some Indian tea was auctioned in Calcutta and Cochin, the bulk of Indian tea, even eight years after independence, was still auctioned in London. The Commission’s remit was simple: to enact changes to reverse the relative distribution of sales between India and the UK.

Tea auctioning began in London under the auspices of the East India Company in the late 1600s. In these auctions, traders bought tea acquired from China. With the expansion of colonial control in India and the development of tea plantations there, beginning in Assam in the 1830s and moving to what is now West Bengal by the 1850s, the tea auction infrastructure expanded to include Calcutta, where the first sales were held in 1861. Just before independence, in 1943, an auction center was established for the south Indian market at Cochin (Kochi). The Auctions Enquiry Commission was chaired by U. K. Ghoshal, chairman of the TBI, and it included British sterling company and Indian rupee company representation from across India’s tea-growing regions. The Commission interviewed and surveyed buyers, brokers, retailers, warehouse managers, and wharf and port representatives. Its members spent weeks traveling from Calcutta to Cochin, to Ceylon, and to London, investigating the infrastructure for Indian tea auctioning, storage, and circulation. True to the Indian government’s commitment to subtly Indianize the plantation system, rather than radically nationalize or abolish it, the Commission sought input from different stakeholders about its plans to move more and more of the auction trade from London to India.

Throughout the inquiry, the ITA (the guild of mainly British sterling tea companies) maintained that auction reform was “not … economically wise.”Footnote ⁵ The ITA argued that if auctions were shifted from London to India, tea buyers would simply buy teas grown in other places. In a pro-free trade move, the UK had abolished its tea duty, meaning that Indonesian, Portuguese East African, Chinese, and Formosan teas, all of which would still be for sale in London, could be acquired at lower prices. The discourse of free trade became a way of discouraging repatriation of auctioning to India.

Visibility was central to the free trade logic. In an interview with Ghoshal and the other study team members, Mr. Crossle, a representative of the London Tea Buyers’ Association, whose firm purchased tea at auction in London, Calcutta, Cochin, and Ceylon, explained: “I think that it must be said that any tea that is not available in London we tend to lose interest in. We appreciate tea that we can see at hand more than tea that is remote.”Footnote ⁶ A tea auction was not just a place for buying and selling. To put it in Levitt’s (Reference Levitt2009) terms, it was a technology that allowed potential buyers to look inside particular lots of tea on offer. Crossle continued:

At auction sites, tasting, smelling, and other organoleptic forms of valuation were as important as pricing (see Besky Reference Besky2020; Reference Besky2016). As Crossle put it, poetically invoking the language of visibility and transparency:

Visibility and tactility were important because each tea’s aroma, flavor, and color changed depending on the season, the time spent in warehouses, and packaging. Tea buyers purchased tea at auction with a view to their potential to serve not as stand-alone items but as parts of complex tea blends, packaged in loose-leaf containers or – as was increasingly the case over the course of the twentieth century – in tea bags. Whereas the contents of those bags were largely a mystery to consumers, buyers, brokers, and blenders needed to be able to see inside them. Storage and warehousing were thus key concerns for the Commission.

A few days after the visit of Ghoshal and the other commissioners, the ITA sent a circular to its members updating them on the Commission’s inquiry.Footnote ⁹ It warned that a shift in auctioning from London to India would result in “the concentration of buying into a few strong hands and the elimination of the UK small buyers.” The ITA emphasized that, in any reform, “the blending aspect must be considered.” It pointed out “that apart from Darjeeling and Assam Second flush teas and uncertain Autumnals, Northern India produces tea of no pronounced flavor and these teas can be replaced by teas from other parts of the world.” Blenders needed access to these low-cost teas. The ITA even expressed worry over the implications of the proposed shift for “the Indian producer’s position.” “Generally speaking,” the ITA stated, Indian companies’ standards of quality were, “as yet … not so high as the Sterling [companies’ standards].” If rupee companies were able to sell their lower-quality tea only in India, brokers would simply buy similar teas from other countries in London, making it difficult for the rupee companies to succeed and improve.

Despite these warnings, the Auctions Enquiry Commission insisted that more auctioning should take place at the already established centers in Calcutta (for the north Indian trade from Assam and Bengal) and Cochin (for the south Indian trade). Its report mandated the expansion of these auction sites and proposed limiting the amount of tea that could be sold outside the auction system.Footnote ¹⁰ Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the TBI set up additional auction centers in tea-growing regions across the country, at Coonoor (1963), Guwahati (1970), Siliguri (1976), and Coimbatore (1981). These auction centers were located in cities that were geographically close to key tea-growing regions. This geographical proximity gave potential buyers the ability to have the tactile, visual experience of tea that they saw as essential to making informed purchases. It also added a layer of regulatory control to the process. Each buyer had to be registered at a regional auction center. Every registered buyer was given access to samples of every lot of tea on offer in a given week. (If they bought a significant amount of tea at auction, these samples were free of charge; if not, they could be purchased for a nominal amount.) As a result, UK-based tea companies increasingly had to work through proxy buyers who were registered to buy at Indian auctions. Over time, tea retailers in the US and Europe started to buy from large-scale tea dealers in a global secondary market.

The TBI’s investigations brought the trade under the purview of India’s government, but they also revealed a hidden tension in the tea trade, between the quality of tea as a material product and the quality of the market itself. As a material product, tea was variable, susceptible to seasonal changes in weather and regional differences in growing climates, but as the TBI’s investigations were taking place, tea was being recast as a tactile, material symbol of India itself – a “swadeshi” commodity. Whereas “free trade” advocates measured the quality of the market in terms of the relative barriers to circulation (e.g., the lack of regulation, the reduction or elimination of duties), government regulators saw the quality of the market in terms of its geographical location and association with the nation. For them, an Indian tea auction was superior to a London tea auction because it could be regulated, taxed, and permitted by India’s government.

The Pan-India Auction

The establishment of the seven distinct auction centers across India between the 1950s and the 1970s had the effect of strengthening government oversight of the industry. In its first iteration in 1953, a regulatory act, the Tea Marketing Control Order (TMCO), mandated that 75 percent of all tea grown in India be sold at one of the auction centers.Footnote ¹¹ The creation of the auction centers also created seven discrete trading communities. In each site, brokers and buyers who were dedicated to a particular regional trade became intimately familiar not only with the seasonal and yearly variations in crop qualities but also with one another. As in London, the world of Indian tea brokerage was by and large one of well-educated middle-class men. Tea brokers attended the same schools, were members of the same clubs, and enjoyed the same sport and leisure activities. For brokers, “quality tea” could best be discerned by individuals with “quality” tastes, habits, and associations beyond the auction and tasting room floors.

By the 1990s, however, the landscape had begun to change. First, the Indian tea industry faced a major market crisis. For three decades, it had enjoyed a steady market in the Soviet Union, but after the fall of the USSR, that market began to dwindle. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the government had begun steadily modifying the TMCO, allowing more and more tea to be sold outside the auction system, in “direct trading” relationships. As the market crisis deepened, tea companies began exploiting this opening, selling their most lucrative, highest-quality teas to buyers in the US and Europe.

It was in this period that new and old forms of transparency began to blend. The reductions in auction quotas under the TMCO were pushed by Indian leaders who favored a liberalization of the country’s economy – an opening up to international markets that had largely been stifled in the first three decades of postcolonial government. By the end of the 1990s, thanks in part to this liberalization, the global ethical trade movement had begun to find a niche in India’s tea industry. Plantations in Darjeeling, Assam, and other famed tea-growing regions began seeking fair trade certification, which offered not only an imprimatur of ethicality but also a direct market. Fair trade tea, by definition, must be sold directly to certified buyers. In fair trade discourse, intermediaries such as auction brokers (and governments) are held up as obstacles to ethical agriculture (Besky Reference Besky2014). By the 2000s, the fair trade movement was being joined by a host of other “partnerships” and start-up schemes that aimed to use e-commerce and the narrative power of web-based storytelling to fuse direct trade to market quality.

But back in auction centers, seasoned brokers saw in the push for direct trade relationships an abandonment of the longstanding emphasis on quality and variability that had long shaped the trade. Fair trade and other direct schemes included no mechanism for ensuring that the product consumers received was actually good, in terms of taste, aroma, color, or any of the other parameters valued by industry insiders. At Nilhat House, the imposing home of the Kolkata tea auction built at the height of the Nehruvian push to recast tea as a national beverage (the building was inaugurated by Nehru himself in 1961), brokers I interviewed between 2008 and 2016 insisted that fair trade could not guarantee quality in this sense.

But during the period of my fieldwork, the auction itself was starting to look anachronistic and corrupt. And bureaucrats at the TBI described it as such. Brokers’ and buyers’ esoteric valuation of tea and the manner in which they sold it in regional auction centers threatened efficiency. To the TBI, it was alarming (but not necessarily surprising) that more and more of the country’s tea was being sold outside the auctions. The system that the TBI had established – regional auction centers, registered buyers, strong government oversight – had been put in place in order to ensure that tea’s material qualities would not be forgotten in the effort to make a quality market that would benefit the Indian nation. But that same system had created its own kind of elitism, opacity, and potential corruption. The gentlemanly, face-to-face auction, bureaucrats claimed, allowed brokers to collude with one another to fix prices. Along the way, of course, the TBI was losing control of these relationships – and, along with them, the industry it was established to regulate. The only way to convince more producers to sell at auction would be to promote transparency.

To be clear, the TBI was adamant that it was not the auction itself that was the problem, just the social relations within it. The auction could be reformed and redeemed through technical intervention. A digital tea auction system was introduced – albeit with a great deal of resistance – between 2008 and 2016 (see Besky Reference Besky2016; Reference Besky2020), but digitization was only an intermediate step. The next step was to further open up the space of the auction center itself – to roll out what regulators called a “pan-India e-auction.” In the pan-India e-auction, launched in June 2016 after several years of repeated delays and false starts, buyers were no longer required to limit their bidding to the auction center (e.g., Kolkata, Cochin, Siliguri) in which they were registered. They could, in the words of TBI proponents of the system, “log-on and buy tea” from any center through an internet-based platform.

The explicit aim of the pan-India auction, as it had been with the electronic platform that preceded it, was to facilitate better “price discovery” and to push higher volumes of tea through the auction. Speaking about the rollout of the pan-India auction, Rita Teaotia, Union Commerce Secretary, told The Hindu, “The new system could prove to be a turning point for tea auctioning in India, which began in 1861 in this city.” Prior to June 2016, each of the auction centers ran according to its own – albeit different – rules mandating schedules for payment, timing of lots, warehousing practices, and other issues. The pan-India auction created one set of auction rules for all the centers. Bureaucrats described this as a means of “bringing uniformity to non-standardized trade.”

The emphasis on standardization is noteworthy here. In the 1950s, TBI investigators responded to British brokers’ concerns about the importance of organoleptically experiencing tea before bidding on it at auction by establishing the seven auction centers. The auction was a sociotechnical means for the broker to “see inside” the lots that were listed in the auction catalog, but it was also a means for the Indian state to better “see” the industry it had inherited from its colonial forebears (Levitt Reference Levitt2009; Scott Reference Scott1999). By the 2000s, however, messages about the importance of ensuring tea’s material quality were being drowned out by messages about the importance of ensuring the quality of the market. As India’s economy was opened up to global competition in a variety of sectors, a market dominated by an insular group of experts who had to be registered with a vast government agency seemed anathema to growth and efficiency. If the TBI had any hope of maintaining its regulatory authority, the space of auctioning had to be expanded from the regional scale of the seven centers to the national scale. The site of the auction could no longer be “Kolkata” or “Kochi” or “Siliguri,” but “India.” If the pan-India auction was successful, then the TBI would be justified in its parallel plan to alter the TMCO to increase the amount of tea plantations were required to sell through the auction. In the wake of the 2016 rollout of the pan-India auction, the TBI tried to raise the quota to 70 percent, but, facing resistance from plantation owners and managers, it eventually dropped the requirement to 50 percent, still 10 percent higher than the post-liberalization low of 40 percent.

Conclusion

The television ad for Tata Gold tea with which I opened this chapter may seem epiphenomenal to the history of regulation and trade. But I would argue that it captures tensions that emerge as the circulation of commodities becomes wrapped up in the language of transparency, or when commodity circulation is reformed through a desire to make visible social relations that have heretofore been occluded. Unfurling along with those long cylindrical twists of tea are tensions of material transparency and market transparency.

Tata Gold distinguishes itself through its materiality. Some 15 percent of its contents are what the company’s marketing material describes as “long leaves.” Most of the tea sold within India is not “long-leaf” but “cut-tear-curl” (CTC) tea, which takes the form of tiny, dark kernels – more reminiscent of instant coffee than a dried leaf. If any tea has become India’s “national beverage” since 1947, then it is CTC tea, which mixes perfectly with milk and spices and withstands harsh boiling much better than the delicate long-leaf variety. Tata Gold highlights the enduring aesthetic forms of colonial production.

Tata’s advertising is also about the market. Since the end of the colonial era, those long leaves have been tasted, priced, and valued for a foreign market. The inclusion of 15 percent, then, represents a kind of quota. The figure of the unfurling leaf signals the emergence of an educated, empowered middle-class consumer. That the consumer is also a voter makes sense in the context of a neoliberalizing India in which political and economic participation are so closely linked.

Yet the advertisement – not surprisingly – oversimplifies things. The material and market forms of transparency are more difficult to reconcile. Although the Tata Gold ad campaign rather firmly juxtaposes the empowered voter–consumer with the lethargic, corrupt state, I have tried to show in this chapter that much can be learned about the limits and possibilities of transparency if we situate it within a longer history of state regulation. Seen from the point of view of TBI bureaucrats, the Indian government’s role in the tea industry has always been to unmask the operations of a large, powerful economic institution. Postcolonial governments – often associated with opacity and corruption – are perhaps unfairly measured against governments in the Global North by their relative willingness to do such unmasking. Whether in the immediate aftermath of decolonization in the 1950s or in the wake of liberalization in the 1990s and 2000s, free trade as a regulatory priority clashes with national-level growth. At the same time, tea’s value and distinction on the market – seen in the juxtaposition between the “quality” of a long-leaf tea versus the abundance and coarseness of a CTC – clash with tea’s value as a symbol of national awakening and development.

My intervention here is to include stories like that of the TBI’s contradictory efforts at regulation within the longer history of transparency. After all, these efforts have been carried out on behalf of the same citizen–consumers that advocates of free trade, fair trade, and direct trade claim to be representing. Considering how many non-state efforts at material and market transparency tend to use the postcolonial state as an ethical or moral foil, it is worth understanding in more precise terms what role the state has played in creating or mitigating material and market opacity.