A stand of trees in the distance.
This is a good thing. When you walk across arid landscapes, in this case the rocky red hills of eastern Rajasthan, every tree represents an oasis. A pool of shade. A place to sit. Often in the company of a god: Trees are holy in India. Many shelter small shrines. But this strange grove is different. Stocky trunks. Gnarled branches. Leaves that flutter—a familiar semaphore of silver and leathery green—in the breezes.
Can they truly be olives?
Yes. They are Athena’s gift to the Greeks.
The olive tree is not native to India. It was introduced the subcontinent about a decade ago by the government as part of an agricultural experiment. An Indian official touring Israel in 2006 admired the rich grids of olives thriving on a kibbutz. Why not grow such wonderful trees in the parched Indian state of Rajasthan? Why not coax Indians to eat the ancient fruit? (Olive oil is used for medicine and massage in India but not in its spicy cooking.) And so, thousands of saplings and a handful of Israeli olive experts were transplanted east.
"I didn’t know what olives were before working here," says Lali Mina (right), an olive leaf harvester at the experimental farm near Bassi. The leaves are used to make tea.
Paul Salopek
Today, there are seven olive test plots across northern India. The 2,135 trees at the experimental farm in the Bassi district, east of the pink city of Jaipur, have yet to produce commercial quantities of fruit. The problem: Olive trees require 200 to 300 hours of chilly temperatures every year in order to blossom, to become fertile.
“It doesn’t get cold enough here,” says Suraj Kanwar, the friendly and energetic agronomist managing the experimental farm. “The climate and soil isn’t identical to Israel. But it is close enough for research.”
Kanwar walks me through high-tech green houses. Inside, one-year-old olive saplings grow waist high. They are sold at a subsidized rate to farmers. She shuttles me in a rugged little jeep to mature stands of trees where local women work. They are stripping leaves from branches with their bare, muscular hands. Since the farm’s groves are largely sterile, Kanwar and her colleagues must invent new commodities from the trees. These leaves are being processed to make a novelty: olive tea.
“I didn’t know what olives were before doing this,” Lali Mina, one of the harvesters, says.
She isn’t alone. Few people do.
For most of the world, olives are a mere garnish—a slash of oil across salad, a rubbery pizza topping, or perhaps an ornament, speared by a toothpick, submerged at the bottom of a martini glass. But to the ancients of the Fertile Crescent, where the wild tree evolved and began to be domesticated at least 6,000 years ago, olives were life itself. The source of nutritious food. A metric of riches. A powerful sacrament.
Subhankar Moulick offers a sampling of newly tested olive leaf teas.
Paul Salopek
For millennia, olive oil was valued as a cleanser, a perfume, and as a source of illumination in lamps. Mediterranean peoples once slathered the fruit’s oil on their skin to warm themselves. "There are two liquids especially agreeable to the human body,” the Roman philosopher Pliny wrote in the first century, “wine inside and oil outside." The trees acquired a divine mystique. With an olive sprig in its beak, a dove announced to Noah the end of the flood. How an olive branch came to represent peace, however, is a mystery. On my long foot journey across the world, I associate it instead with war. The last time I had rested under the dusty green foliage of olive boughs, I listened to gunfire pop through the hills of the West Bank.
“Few things are healthier than olive products,” says Subhankar Moulick, manager of an Indian company that is testing the world’s first commercial olive-leaf tea at the Bassi farm. “They have natural ingredients to treat heart disease, antioxidants for skin care, even anti-cancer properties.”
Moulick’s factory stands among the exiled groves. He dries and shreds the olive leaves on a conveyor, then mixes in lemongrass, mint, and even basil—the holy herb of Hindu India. He pours us samples.
Filthy, sweaty, sunburned from walking, I sip.
Something refined and very old infuses the tea’s olive under-flavor. It is delicious, yet hard to place. Ineffable. In Exodus, when the Israelites fled Egypt, God led them across the wilderness in the form of a pillar of smoke. In Hebrew, the word for pillar, timara, translates literally as tree or tree-shaped. This must be it, I think, setting down the delicate white cup. Smoke.
