The Historical Nostalgia of India’s Coffee Houses
Originally Published: 18 July 2020
In Loving Memory,
They still silence dissent.
We still struggle. We still resist.
"All revolutions start in coffee houses you know."
Ram Shastri- an activist and journalist reminisces over the Coffee Houses of India. Speaking to British photojournalist- Stuart Freedman- Shastri nostalgically says:
"It wasn't about coffee. It was a home away from home. We sat till the lights were switched off”.
In his photobook,'The Palaces of Memory Tales from the Indian Coffee House', Freedman captures these romantic sentiments through his candid shots of more than thirty Coffee Houses in India. Freedman first wandered into the coffee house in 1994 when he visited Delhi. It wasn't until 2010 that he thought of photographing them once rumours spread that Delhi's coffee house might be shut down: "It was as if, suddenly, Delhi had rediscovered its love for the old place” Freedman said.
India may be a loyal tea-loving nation but its romance with coffeehouses was no casual fling.
Coffee houses in England are well known for hosting intellectual discussion and inspiring revolutionary thought. India has been robbed of its own Coffee House tale for so long.
FROM COLONIALISM TO COFFEEHOUSE: A BRIEF HISTORY
David Burton- a food historian- in his book ‘The Raj at the Table’ (1993) writes “India’s first coffee house opened in Calcutta after the battle of Plassey in 1780. Soon after, John Jackson and Cottrell Barrett opened the original Madras Coffee House, which was followed in 1792 by the Exchange Coffee Tavern at the Muslim, waited at the mouth of the Madras Fort.”
A drawing of English men gathering in a coffee house in India can be found in James Hoffmann's book 'The World Atlas of Coffee'. The caption reads, "During the 19th century, coffee houses in India become popular and often raucous meeting places for English gentlemen to socialize, do business, discuss the news and to gossip." Noticeably, all the men in the drawing are white and in the corner- almost cut off from the page entirely- an Indian man can be seen serving coffee to the 'English gentlemen'. Ironically- yet, unsurprisingly- Indians themselves were banned from entering these coffeehouses.
Colonisers preferred their coffee with milk and a shot of racial discrimination.
It was only in 1936 that the original Indian Coffee house chain was set up by the Coffee Cess Committee during the British Raj (rule), with the first coffee house opening in Bombay. World War II had a dire impact on the coffee industry in India. The Raj thus established the Coffee Board by the 'Coffee Act VII (1942)'.
COMMUNISM & COFFEEHOUSES
During the mid 1950's the Coffee Board decided to shut down several coffee houses due to sustaining financial losses. This resulted in a number of employees losing their jobs.
And so began India's caffeinated class struggle.
The All India Coffee Board Labour Union's Communist Leader - A.K. Gopalan- met Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who advised them to establish co-operative Societies and run Coffee Houses of Labourers.
The Indian Coffee Workers Cooperative Society was born in 1957 and established the first Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place, New Delhi- that same year. Such were the caffeinated products of 'the Nehruvian Socialist era'.
INDIA'S COFFEEHOUSE ENLIGHTENMENT
Post-independence India witnessed the birth of its own Enlightenment period.
In an interview Freedman acknowledges the historic significance of the cafes, mentioning how "Politicians plotted independence in these coffee houses before the war." Indeed, it is this appreciation which allows Freedman to present India through a lens neither Bollywood nor western media have ever shown.
In the same interview Freedman says:
"I’ve worked in South Asia a lot and I don’t want to keep imaging India in the same way, which is either poverty or exotica…People live their lives and fall in love just like we do all over the world. We don’t have to exoticize people and we don’t have to pity them."
In his book 'The Brother Bihari'- Indian journalist- Sankarshan Thakur writes: “Indian Coffee House was where I first heard words like Fuehrer and fascism first, words like proletariat and bourgeoisie, like Comintern and Nato…" Shashi Tharoor- a prominent Indian politician- also recalls the intellectual debate and dissemination of ideas that took place in the coffee house: "The waiters at the coffee house in Kolkata were famous for their views on everything from the Vietnam war to Jean-Luc Godard’s films."
A regular at an Indian Coffee House in Koltata recounts the institution's glory days:
"We talked politics, poetry, plays and personal issues. Verdicts were delivered, reputations were made and ruined here. There was no such thing as a stranger—boundaries blurred as newspapers flew open, coffee arrived and conversation flowed.”
The Indian Coffee House in Allahabad was a lodestone of artistic expression. An article expounds on its glory days, "It was here that the famous poet and public intellectual par excellence Firaq Gorakhpuri would hold his informal darbar, often speaking impromptu on literature, taking up a literary figure or even a word and then expounding on it for hours."
The scars of a colonised nation never fully fade and at this point they were still healing. Then the bandage was ripped off too soon- by Nehru's own daughter.
THE EMERGENCY: A BITTER BREW
During the late hours of June 25th, 1975, India awoke to a voice:
“The President has proclaimed Emergency. There is nothing to panic about.”
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi spoke to the nation from the All India Radio- while India was half asleep- possibly dreaming.
She woke up to a nightmare.
Numerous factors led to Indira Gandhi declaring an Emergency. Notably, the High Court in Allahabad found Indira Gandhi to be guilty of corrupt electoral practices and disqualified her from standing election for six years. Gandhi ignored calls for her resignation and suspended the constitution, enacting martial law to silence opposition. This India was analogous to how Nehru envisioned her to be. An article in Time magazine phrases this notion most succinctly: "She quickly ripped apart her father’s democracy and amended India’s constitution to give herself enormous powers."
During the Emergency, a crackdown on dissent and censorship of newspapers crushed freedom of expression on the streets. Within the silence, dissent exceptionally brewed in what became a quasi-state: the Coffee House.
Kristin Plys, is one of the first academics to thoroughly analyse the Indian Coffee Houses during the Emergency. Plys' upcoming book 'Brewing Resistance' examines the dissent which flourished- then dissipated- in the Indian Coffee House. In an article [1], Plys writes: "The totalitarian moment pushed contentious politics into the Coffee House, initially galvanizing it: even the older members of Indira Gandhi's Congress Party, who were active participants in India's Freedom Movement, were key participants in coffee house deliberations." Interviewing a Gandhian Peace Studies professor, Plys mentions [2] how during this period: "The older Congress members who fought the British Empire were still alive…and they were unhappy about the Emergency because it reminded them of British rule and suffering."
Unlike in England, where Charles II had unsuccessfully attempted to ban coffee houses in London for fear of political dissent, India's secret affair with the Coffee House was short-lived.
In the same article, Plys describes [3] how the exception to the Emergency's suppression became a striking casualty:
"The space of the coffee house may foster political deliberation among different viewpoints, but when interaction is concentrated in one such space, it becomes easier for the state and its agents to suppress oppositional politics and more difficult for both establishment and oppositional politics themselves to retain a diversified public sphere character."
Primary sources such as newspapers published during the Emergency also corroborate the unique dissent echoing the walls of the Coffee House. For example, a New York Times article published in 1976, describes the experience of a foreigner who upon returning to India, realises it is not the same nation he knew when he visited before the Emergency:
"When I met my friend that morning in the dusky recesses of the crowded coffee shop I was worried. Was it all right to talk there, I asked solicitously. For a moment he surveyed the room uneasily. “Oh, why not?” he shrugged finally, and then launched into a minute dissection of the current regime."
In 1976, the Coffee House in Connaught place was bulldozed by Sanjay Gandhi- Indira Gandhi's son. This was a moment of peculiar historical circularity. The beloved establishment Nehru had helped create, would be destroyed by his grandson.
After the Emergency ended, the same Coffee House was "reborn on the terrace of newly built Mohan Singh Place." Though resurrected, its spirit did not embody the same pre-Emergency energy. Nothing could.
However, as Stuart Freedman's photographs show, the Indian Coffee Houses still bears a unique character and tells a statement never told before.
The coffee house is- as Freedman describes it in his essay for The Palaces of Memory:
"A black and white movie in an era of 3-D. A palace of mid-century modernism, broken but still standing."
IN LOVING MEMORY
Once being forbidden by the colonialists, undergoing a socialist revolution and then surviving the tyranny which flourished under a democracy, the Coffee Houses of India truly have a history unmatched by any institution.
The crackdown on dissent in India today is a fresh wound, another scar which may never fully heal. But like the Coffee House, India remains "broken but still standing." Standing firm, she reminds the oppressed, the struggling, the resistance, of a memory we never had but one we feel a historical nostalgia for.
For a place whose walls have echoed ambitious chants calling for Independence, there's no saying when the Coffee House will brew its next revolution.
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Citations:
[1] Plys, K. Political deliberation and democratic reversal in India: Indian coffee house during the emergency (1975–77) and the third world “totalitarian moment”. Theor Soc 46, 117–142 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9287-1, p. 117
[2] Ibid, p. 131
[3] Ibid, p. 117