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Journalism of Courage
Indispensable to the tea planter, the motorcycle has convincingly proved its utility ever since the pioneer British planters introduced it to Munnar’s tea estates in the early 1900s. Today it is the tea planter’s mainstay, ferrying him to every nook and corner of his sprawling estate and thereby facilitating supervision.
The other day I came across a 1911 photograph of a Munnar planter sitting astride one of the earliest motorcycles — an austere-looking, springless contraption with a hard leather seat that must have wreaked havoc on even a well-upholstered posterior, given those bumpy and pot-holed estate roads!
Indeed, growing up on a tea estate near Munnar in the fifties, I often used to see the Scottish manager literally jouncing through the fields on his Francis Barnett motorcycle with an employee precariously perched on the pillion. Incidentally, it is said that the British planter’s monthly motorcycle allowance was higher than his marriage allowance, prompting light-hearted speculation that his hard-boiled Scottish employers attached more importance to the maintenance of his motorcycle rather than his wife!
Over the years the motorcycle has faithfully borne tea planters through thick and thin. Once a mounted planter, an ardent conservationist, resolutely pursued a fleeing poacher — only to land up, bike and all, in one of the latter’s carefully concealed pits meant to trap wild pigs! Fortunately, he sustained only a badly bruised ego. Another motorcycle-borne planter all but drove into a wild tusker while going round his estate. Abandoning his bike, he fled — only to discover later that the pachyderm had worked off its ire by punching a six-inch hole through the petrol tank.
More recently a young planter had an equally terrifying experience when he surprised a herd of elephants on a sharp bend. When his hastily grounded two-wheeler was recovered, it was found to be far from roadworthy, having been mauled into a mass of mangled metal!
Undoubtedly, the pioneer planters must have had equally scary brushes. But they never could have dreamt that a century later, female tea planters would manage the estates they had opened, zipping around on motorcycles as effortlessly as their male counterparts and facing the same hazards. Yes, another male-dominated bastion has fallen. Motorcycle-borne ladies now independently manage tea estates in Munnar — a trend that started in the mid-nineties and continues.
However, while the male planter may be replaceable, the motorcycle certainly is not. An undoubted boon, it has proved its worth and become a permanent fixture in the working life of a tea planter. As one of them aptly observed, “It’s in fact an extension of my legs!”
