Nimokh cha/pani and the governance of taste: hypertension, nutritionism, and Assam’s tea plantation workers

This paper interrogates the practice of drinking nimokh cha/pani (salt tea) among tea plantation workers in Assam and the controversy surrounding it. Plantation workers generally consider salt tea as restorative beverage – something the laboring body needs to withstand long hours of work. By contrast, health experts see the consumption of salt tea as a habit to be eliminated because of the associated risk of hypertension. I argue that the clinical anxiety over workers’ salt consumption, co-opted by plantation managements and backed by the state, has resulted in public health interventions that operate within the rubric of “taste correction.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2023) across three Upper Assam tea estates, I show how sensory pleasure, metabolic necessity, and questions of political identity converge in the drinking of nimokh cha/pani. Building on the broader history of plantation governance in Assam, I contend that contemporary dietary interventions pushed by the state – including a 2017 “ban” on the provisioning of salt tea at worksites – have led to the reworking of colonial disease management into postcolonial nutritional governance. Consequently, taste has emerged as a contested medico-political site with public health imperatives coming into conflict with the plantation’s sensorial ecology.