1858: Maniram Dewan, tea infuser
6 comments February 26th, 2017 Headsman
On this date in 1858, the British hanged Assamese grandee Maniram Dewan for joining the 1857 Indian Rebellion.
Maniram was a young man going on 20 when the British wrested control from Burma of the eastern province Assam, and he carved himself a successful career in the empire.
But without doubt his lasting service to the Union Jack and the world was discovering to the British the existence of a theretofore unknown varietal of the tea plant, cultivated in Assam’s monsoon-drenched jungles by the Singhpo people* — a fact of geopolitical significance since it augured a means to crack the Chinese stranglehold on tea supply so taxing to the current accounts.** Today, rich Assam tea is one of the world’s largest tea crops, yielding 1.5 million pounds annually.
Maniram himself was among its earliest commercial cultivators (in fact, the first native Indian cultivator), setting up with an estate at the village of Chenimora in the 1840s, but the next decade found him increasingly irritated by the injuries British avarice to the extent that he began intriguing to restore the lately dispossessed kings.
With the outbreak of rebellion in 1857, Maniram and the like-minded made their move to restore the Ahom heir Kandarpeswar Singha but the plot was betrayed and landed its authors in irons.
Although he suffered the law’s last extremity for his plot, Maniram’s name lives on in honor in modern India. A trade center in Assam’s largest city bears his name, for instance; and, when India declared tea its official drink in 2013, it timed the announcement to fall on Maniram’s birthday (April 17, 1806).
* It goes without saying that imperial recognition of their secret produce did not redound to the benefit of the Singhpo. Although Singhpo assembled the very first export crop, much of their land was soon gobbled up by tea plantations, and when they rebelled in 1843 the East India Company annexed it outright. “Now it is said that where the tea grows, that is yours, but when we make sacrifices we require tea for our funerals,” a Singhpo chief wrote the Company, mournfully. “We therefore perceive that you have taken all the country, and we, the old and respectable, cannot get tea to drink.” (Source)
** China required payments in specie for tea, an imbalance which London tried to redress by foisting an undesirable import upon China — resulting in the Opium War.
On this day..
- 1947: Jonas Noreika, "General Storm" - 2020
- 1852: Hélène Jégado, serial arsenic murderer - 2019
- 1838: William Moore, thirsty for blood - 2018
- 1765: Juan de la Cruz Palaris - 2016
- 1785: Barbara Erni, the Golden Boos - 2015
- 1462: John de Vere, Earl of Oxford - 2014
- 1909: C.Y. Timmons - 2013
- 1870: Wyatt Outlaw lynched by the Ku Klux Klan - 2012
- 277: Mani, dualist - 2011
- 1939: Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar and Pavel Postyshev - 2010
- 1839: An opium merchant - 2009
- 1853: János Libényi, who stabbed an emperor and built a church - 2008
Entry Filed under: 19th Century,Businessmen,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,England,Execution,Famous,Hanged,History,India,Martyrs,Occupation and Colonialism,Politicians,Power,Treason,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1857, 1858, economics, february 26, maniram dewan, tea
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