Maniram Dewan, the First Indian to Plant Assam Tea, and the British Who Hanged Him
Maniram Dewan ran the Assam Company's tea operation, then quit and planted the first Indian-owned commercial tea gardens in the 1840s. In 1853 he petitioned the British in writing and was dismissed; they hanged him on 26 February 1858. Here is the plain record.
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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 1840s1, the first Indian-owned commercial tea in Assam. The British hanged him on 26 February 1858, at the Jorhat jail, 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, the most-cited account credits him with having already put the British onto the plant itself. In 1823, on the upper Brahmaputra, he is said to have 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 month4. 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 bearing5, 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 had governed the region for centuries, 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 in Calcutta and held for weeks in Alipore jail4 before being brought up the river by steamer to Jorhat, where Charles Holroyd, Sivasagar's Principal Assistant, presided over the trial that sentenced him. He and a fellow conspirator, Piyali Barua, were publicly hanged on 26 February 1858 at the Jorhat jail3. 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 Williamson6, and so the first Indian-owned commercial tea in Assam passed, soon after his death, back into British hands.
The record, set down straight
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: the first Assamese to grow the leaf as 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.