Issue #11 of the Chai Bhai newsletter. Pack your cup — we're moving.
The Chai Map of India
One of the most common misconceptions about Indian chai is that it is homogeneous — a single recipe replicated a billion times a day. The truth is that chai in Kashmir is almost unrecognisable as the same beverage as chai in Chennai. The common thread is tea leaves and milk. Everything else — the spices, the method, the sweetener, the vessel, the social context — varies dramatically by region.
Here is the map.
North India: Bold and Spiced
Delhi and the Hindi belt: The baseline against which most people measure Indian chai. Assam CTC, whole milk, sugar, and a variable spice blend depending on the stall. Ginger and cardamom are constants. Black pepper appears in winter. Served in glass, kulhad, or small steel cup.
Punjab: Thicker, sweeter, more milk-forward than Delhi. Cardamom is heavy. The chai here has the density of something designed to sustain physical labour — which, in agricultural Punjab, it is. Served in large glasses, often accompanied by pakoras or parathas.
Kashmir: Noon chai (pink chai) is the valley's daily drink — green tea, milk, bicarbonate of soda (produces the characteristic pink), and salt. No sugar. Drunk from a samovar through the day. The taste is subtle, salty, floral. For most mainland Indians, their first encounter with noon chai is a genuine surprise.
East India: The Tea-Growing Heartland
Assam: CTC chai, the mother of all mass-market tea. Drunk strong and plain — milk and sugar separate, added to individual preference — by a population that lives within sight of the tea gardens. The pride of the Assamese in their tea is considerable and justified.
Darjeeling: The tea aristocracy of India — delicate first flush orthodox teas drunk without milk, in small cups, with the reverence they deserve. "Chai" in Darjeeling means something completely different from anywhere else in India.
West Bengal and Kolkata: Tea house culture — the addas (intellectual gatherings) of Kolkata's coffee houses evolved alongside a strong tea tradition. Light, milky, Bengali-style chai served with mishti (sweets), particularly sandesh and mishti doi.
West India: Spice and Irani
Rajasthan: The most aggressively spiced chai in India. Cardamom, ginger, black pepper, and sometimes fennel, all at higher ratios than anywhere else. Desert climate logic — the chai fights the cold of desert nights and the dryness of desert days.
Gujarat: Masala chai with a Gujarati character — lighter on ginger than Rajasthan, heavier on fennel and saunf. Served with fafda (crispy chickpea-flour snacks) as the standard morning combination.
Mumbai: Multiple traditions intersect — the tapri masala chai of the suburbs, the Irani café cutting chai of the old city, and the cutting chai of the business district, served in half-glasses, consumed in four minutes between meetings. Mumbai is the city that invented cutting chai as a concept.
South India: The Exception
South India is, largely, filter coffee territory — particularly Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and parts of Andhra Pradesh. The chai that exists in these states is an import from the north.
The exception is Hyderabad's Irani chai (covered in our Places section this month) and the special teas of the Western Ghats — the herbal preparations of Wayanad, the cardamom-tea blends of Munnar, and the distinctive light-style teas of Coorg.
Kerala is the state where chai and filter coffee coexist most gracefully — coastal Kerala leans coffee, hill-station Kerala leans chai, and the transition zone produces genuinely interesting hybrid beverages.
“India's chai diversity is a mirror of India's cultural diversity. Every variation is local knowledge preserved in a cup. Learn to read the chai, and you understand the place.
Next month: Independence Day special — chai, nationhood, and what the cup means 78 years on.
Chai piyo, zindagi jiyo.
— Chai Bhai