Housed at 120 Doe Library (South/Southeast Asia Library), Steeped in Time is a curated exhibition at that traces the enduring legacy and evolving future of Assam tea. Positioned at the crossroads of colonial enterprise, Indigenous stewardship, and neoliberal global trade, it examines how the industry has transformed landscapes and livelihoods over centuries—while exploring how the revival of traditional agriculture and agroforestry offers more just and sustainable alternatives.
Curated by Shreya Chaudhuri, a senior at UC Berkeley, majoring in Environmental Science and Geography with minors in Global Poverty & Practice and Data Science, Steeped in Time, draws directly from her honors thesis research on Traditional Ecological Knowledge and colonial legacies in Assam’s tea industry. Rooted in her family’s six-generation legacy of tea farming in India, the exhibition explores how the global tea trade was built on extraction and erasure—and how Indigenous agroforestry practices offer pathways toward more just and sustainable futures. Shreya’s work bridges research, policy, education, and advocacy, centering Black and Brown communities and local knowledge systems. She leads Project Planet, a nonprofit for decolonial environmental education, founded the DeCal Decolonizing Environmentalism and the Decolonial Environmental Network on campus, and serves as a Climate Action Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Student Environmental Resource Center (check out the mini tea cafe she built at SERC!).
Learn more about Steeped in Time here!