Tea or Coffee?

Section Editor Tanisha Shah explores the history of chai and coffee, and the quiet rituals that ground us.

Warning for the readers: I’m about to sound like a proper old South Asian uncle in this article. 

If I don’t have my tea in the morning, my day is ruined. I need chai (ginger tea)—the Indian way. So does my whole family, with the exception of my brother. It never mattered if we had to leave at four in the morning or had over twenty-four hours of travel ahead; we woke up at three for the tea. 

Growing up in India, chai always held more emotions than any other beverage. Sure, coffee’s nice here and there when you’re cramming for your exams or need an excuse to go out with your friends. But when it’s cold, when you’re sick, when it rains? You need tea. Chai is comfort. The debate between tea and coffee has followed me throughout my life, and it trailed me all the way to Australia. 

It wasn’t until recently that I learned about the history of such beverages. Chai emerged in Indian culture as a quiet rebellion against the British, obsessed with Chinese tea leaves: dark leaves transformed with milk, sugar, and spices into something far richer than what they ever intended. In Australia, though, Italian migrants deserve the credit for shifting the nation’s taste toward coffee, replacing tea’s colonial footprints. I always saw coffee as the “cool girl” persona—at least until I was forced to switch to it myself. 

Recently, due to unforeseen circumstances, I had to swap chai for coffee. I thought my addiction was just to a hot beverage in the morning. It only took two days before I was craving coffee as soon as I woke up. But what I missed wasn’t the taste, it was the ritual.

My roommates know the first thing I do each morning is make my tea. The little calmness before the day begins gives me a few seconds of stillness before I need to shift gears in my brain and get working. With coffee, I lost that grounding moment. I realised I wasn’t just a chai-girly because I’m a creature of habit; I craved the ritual itself. The moment when time pauses. As an overachieving undergrad, I rarely had the luxury of slow mornings. But even if I had to be out the door by seven, chai made sure I had ten minutes of peace in the rush. 

I will always be a chai-girly, and I will always cherish my ten minutes of stillness. But living in the land of flat-whites has made me notice the deeper cultural stories behind every cup. Both India and Australia would come to a grinding halt if chai or coffee disappeared. India embraced chai and made it her own; Australia embraced coffee the same way it embraced the migrants who brought it here. 

Either way, I’ll keep my chai, but dip my hat in coffee every so often, if only to remind myself that what we drink isn’t just a habit. It’s history.