When most people think of Indian tea, they think of Assam or Darjeeling. Yet tucked into the Blue Mountains of southern India is one of the country’s most distinctive tea-growing regions: Nilgiri.

Understanding Nilgiri requires more than tasting the tea. Its history has been shaped by geography, colonial expansion, global trade, economic change, and a new generation of tea makers working to restore the region’s reputation.

A Brief History of Tea in India

For centuries, China dominated the world’s tea trade. Tea was one of Britain’s most valuable imports, creating a costly trade imbalance. Seeking to reduce its dependence on Chinese tea, the British East India Company began searching for places within its empire where tea could be successfully grown.

This expansion took place under British colonial rule. Tea plantations were established on lands that had long been home to Indigenous communities throughout India. As plantations expanded, traditional land use changed dramatically, and many communities were displaced or marginalized. Plantation labor was often difficult, poorly paid, and shaped by colonial systems of control.

One of the most influential and controversial figures in tea history was Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist hired by the British East India Company. In the 1840s, he secretly entered China’s tea-growing regions, collected tea plants and seeds, documented tea-making techniques, and “recruited” skilled Chinese tea makers to help establish tea cultivation in British India.

From Britain’s perspective, Fortune helped create a tea industry that could compete with China. From China’s perspective, his actions represented the loss of valuable plants, knowledge, and expertise. Today, many historians describe his work as one of history’s most significant examples of industrial espionage and biopiracy.

It is also important to recognize that tea was not entirely new to India. Long before commercial plantations were established, the Indigenous Singpho and other communities in Assam had been harvesting and drinking tea from native Camellia sinensis var. assamica plants that grew wild in the region.

The British did not discover tea in India. Instead, they developed a commercial tea industry by combining Indigenous knowledge, native Assam tea plants, tea plants and processing techniques obtained from China, and the plantation system established under British colonial rule.

The history of tea reflects remarkable innovation and craftsmanship, but also colonial expansion, the displacement of Indigenous communities, exploitative labor systems, and the movement of plants, knowledge, and people through unequal systems of power.

Tea Comes to the Nilgiris

Long before coffee or tea, the Nilgiri Hills were home to the Toda, Kota, Badaga, Kurumba, and Irula peoples, who had lived in and cared for these mountains for centuries.

In the early 1800s, British civil servant John Sullivan established Ooty (Udhagamandalam) as a hill station. His promotion of settlement and agriculture helped open the Nilgiris to plantation agriculture that would later transform the landscape.

In 1835, French botanist George Samuel Perrottet planted the first experimental tea seeds in the Nilgiris at Ketti. Although these early plantings were experimental, they demonstrated that the region’s cool mountain climate was well suited to growing tea.

During British colonial rule, large areas of land were claimed for plantation agriculture. British-owned coffee estates spread across the hillsides, fundamentally changing the landscape and displacing or marginalizing traditional land use.

In the late 1800s, coffee leaf rust swept through South India, devastating the coffee crop. Rather than abandoning the plantations, many estate owners converted their coffee fields to tea. Commercial tea production began in 1862, and the cool mountain climate proved ideal for growing Camellia sinensis. Nilgiri soon became known for producing bright, fragrant orthodox teas.

By the 1970s, nearly 80% of Nilgiri tea was exported to Soviet bloc countries through long-term government trade agreements. Because there was a guaranteed buyer, many factories shifted from handcrafted orthodox teas to high-volume CTC (Crush, Tear, Curl) production.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, those government contracts disappeared almost overnight. Tea prices fell dramatically, some plantations were abandoned, and many factories struggled to survive. Those that remained either continued producing commodity tea or reinvented themselves by focusing on high-quality specialty teas.

By the early 2000s, a new generation of growers and tea makers chose a different path, returning to handcrafted orthodox production and showcasing the unique terroir of the Blue Mountains.

Among those helping lead this revival are the Theneer family, whose teas express the character of the region through careful cultivation and thoughtful processing, and Tea Studio, an artisan producer near Coonoor known for innovative small-batch teas inspired by Chinese and Japanese processing traditions. Together, they are helping restore Nilgiri’s reputation as one of India’s most exciting specialty tea regions.

Terroir: The Blue Mountains

Nilgiri means “Blue Mountains.” Unlike Assam, with its low-elevation tropical plains that produce bold, malty, full-bodied teas, or Darjeeling, which grows on the young Himalayan Mountains and is celebrated for its seasonal flushes and signature muscatel character, the Nilgiris are part of the ancient Western Ghats, one of the world’s oldest mountain ranges.

Growing at elevations of approximately 1,000–2,500 meters (3,300–8,200 feet), Nilgiri receives rainfall from both the southwest and northeast monsoons, allowing tea to be harvested nearly year-round. Cool mountain air, ancient shola forests, and winter frosts produce teas that are floral, bright, naturally sweet, and wonderfully aromatic.

Every 12 years, the Neelakurinji flowers blanket the mountains in blue, and bees produce the rare Kurinji honey, harvested only during these special bloom years.