The first Indian to grow tea as a commercial crop was an Assamese official named Maniram Dewan. He ran the Assam Company's tea works, then left and planted his own gardens at Jorhat in the 1840s, the first Indian-owned commercial tea in Assam. In 1858 the British hanged him for backing the revolt of 1857. The gardens he started are still worked. His name is on no chest you will buy.

The man who showed the British the plant

His name was Maniram Dutta Baruah, born 17 April 1806, and the title that stuck was Dewan, manager. Before he planted a single bush he had already put the British onto the plant itself. In 1823, on the upper Brahmaputra, he directed the Scottish trader Robert Bruce to the Singpho chief Bessa Gam, who showed Bruce the wild tea the local people had long brewed. That is the introduction the whole trade rests on. The full account of how the East India Company turned that plant into an industry is its own record; what matters here is that an Assamese man stood at the start of it.

Dewan of the Assam Company

When the Assam Company set up to work the new tea, it hired the man who knew the country and its leaf. In 1839, the year the first Assam chests were sold at the London auction, Maniram became the Dewan of the company's operation at Nazira, on a salary of two hundred rupees a month. The firm that built the British tea trade in Assam ran, in part, on his knowledge of where the plant grew and how to handle the people who picked it.

By the mid-1840s he had fallen out with the company's officers and left. He had also learned the trade by then, which is the part that counted.

The first Indian planter

After he resigned, Maniram put his own money and his own contacts into two gardens: one at Cinnamara, south of Jorhat, the other at Selung, near Sonari in Sibsagar. Up to that point the gardens had been the company's affair. Cinnamara made him the first Indian to grow tea commercially in Assam, and it was no token plot. By 1853 the Cinnamara garden ran to about 270 acres, with roughly 200 acres of tea coming into bearing, on the figures kept by tea historians.

He did not stop at tea. He smelted iron, worked gold, made salt, and manufactured matchlocks, hoes, and cutlery, the kind of broad enterprise the records list when they want to show an Assamese could build an industry without a London firm behind him. He proved the leaf could be his own crop. By weight and measure, he passed the test he set himself.

The petition before the rope

Here is the part the short tellings skip. Before he raised a sword he raised a pen. The British had abolished the Ahom monarchy that once ruled the valley, and Maniram had grievances of his own and the country's. In 1853 he took the legal route. He filed a petition with A.J. Moffat Mills, a judge sent up from the Calcutta Sadar court, arguing that the people of Assam had been "reduced to the most abject and hopeless state of misery" and asking that the old Ahom administration be restored under the exiled prince Kandarpeswar Singha.

Mills filed the plea as a "curious document" from a subject he treated as merely discontented, and noted Maniram down as "a clever but an untrustworthy and intriguing person." The first Indian tea planter had asked the empire, in writing, through its own court, and been told no in those words. The revolt came after that, not instead of it.

The reckoning of 1857

When the revolt of 1857 spread north India, Maniram was in Calcutta, petitioning again on Kandarpeswar's behalf. This time he also worked underground. He sent coded letters, carried by messengers, urging the prince and the Assam sepoys to rise, with a plan to march on Jorhat and install Kandarpeswar as king on the day of Durga Puja. The plot was found before it could move. The British intercepted the letters, and the rising never reached the streets.

Maniram was arrested, brought up the river by steamer to Jorhat, and tried. He and a fellow conspirator, Piyali Barua, were publicly hanged on 26 February 1858 at the Jorhat jail. He was fifty-one. Tea garden workers struck work after the hanging, the accounts record, in support of his cause. His estates were put up for auction and bought by George Williamson, and so the first Indian-owned commercial tea in Assam passed, within months of his death, back into British hands.

The record, set down straight

Two facts sit side by side and both belong in the ledger. The man helped start a trade the British ran at a profit, and that same empire hanged him when he turned against it. The gardens he planted at Cinnamara are still worked. When you next read the strength of an Assam through the milk, it is worth knowing that the first Assamese who proved the leaf could be his own crop tried the courts first, was filed away as a "curious document," and paid for the rest of his politics with his life. That is the record, as of June 2026, drawn from the public histories and the colonial account of his trial.