In those days there was no coffee!

Take the exclamation mark at the end away and you have the title of a book. Yes indeed. In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History is the delightful title of a book by A.R. Venkatachalapathy (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008), a bilingual author prolific in both Tamil and English.

In Those Days There Was No Coffee is a collection of nine essays that explore life in the Tamil-speaking parts of early 20th century Madras Presidency. The title is slightly deceptive, for only one of the nine essays is on coffee. Arguing that history is not a straightforward reading of the archives, Venkatachalapathy asserts that a careful study of popular literature can provide a nuanced understanding of the past and offer valuable perspectives denied by the archives. Using coffee as the object of the title essay, the author uncovers references to the drink in Tamil newspapers, journals, short stories and autobiographies of the colonial period to purvey rich insights into cultural values and perceptions of the early 20th century, accompanied by a superb exposition on how these were influenced by the coffee-drinking habit. The perspective that unfolds in such an unusual reading of history is likely to pose something of a surprise to any Tamil worth their salt who has grown up with the ubiquitous aroma of filter coffee wafting through the house thrice a day. Admittedly, in my own case, I was well into my twenties before I could even begin to conceive of a past when coffee, the common man’s elixir, was unknown and people drank something else.

Venkatachalapathy captures the tension and ambivalence of early 20th century society when coffee was seeping into popular Tamil middle class consciousness, conferring status and sophistication on the drinker. However, conservative elements inveighed against what they termed an ‘evil influence of modernity’ and ‘a copy-cat imitation of the West’. The contention was partly over the supplanting of the traditional morning drink neeragaram (the word is a combination of the Sanskritic words, neer and aahaar) by an alien, coffee. To quote the author, ‘Made by fermenting water drained after cooking rice, and adding water and salt to taste, neeragaram's demise was lamented by many intellectuals - a sign of their cultural anxiety.’ My grandmother confirms that in her younger days children and elders alike woke up to a breakfast drink of neeragaram, and that in the countryside this could be prepared even out of raagi, kombu, cholam (maize) and other traditional grains. She adds however, that in her time the rice was dehusked at home using the olakai or the traditional metal-bottomed long wooden pestle. As a result, it would not be dehusked completely and would possess considerable nutritive value, quite unlike the rice of the present day, which is polished clean by the comprehensive mechanised dehusking of the rice mill.

The public denouncement of coffee went to extremes that may sound at once ridiculous and amusing to us at this point in time, a hundred years later. One writer reviled the drink, calling it even more addictive than arrack, and went on to regret, ‘In those days people lived a hundred years [by drinking neeragaram]; nowadays times have changed. Even the women who work the fields demand coffee. There is not a single household without a coffee drinker’. Another critic complained, using the language of modern medicine, that ‘with the increase in coffee-drinking in our country, infant mortality, diabetes, constipation and other lowly diseases have begun to afflict our brothers and sisters’!

The attack on coffee extended also to women, by women. Thus, the Stri Dharma, published by the Women's India Association wailed:

Alas! This damned thing has got hold of women! Two cups of coffee have become the order of the day...This habit has taken over even aged women. These old women who were adept in home remedies now rush to the doctor, making a beeline to the hospital for the slightest headache.

The railing against coffee and women spilled over to the realm of the political. A highly sexist letter to Gandhi, apparently in the wake of the Non-Cooperation Movement, went thus:

The greatest obstacle in the way of success to our [non-cooperation] movement in Madras are our women. Some of them are very reactionary, and a very large number of the high class Brahmin ladies have become addicted to many of the Western vices. They drink coffee not less than three times a day, and consider it very fashionable to drink more.

These vituperative attacks on coffee, by their very vehemence, suggest that the anti-coffee brigade was fighting a losing battle. Very much so. For coffee gradually moved on from being a mere refreshment to become an integral part of cultural consciousness relating to notions of refinement and hospitality. Writers began to use coffee as a metaphor. For instance, the short stories of Pudumaippithan, the celebrated Tamil short story writer, are littered with references to the drink. In fact, one of his stories, Kadavulum Kandasamy Pillaiyum (God and Kandasamy Pillai), considered a classic, has Lord Shiva descending to the earth to meet the central character, Kandasamy Pillai, in Madras, whereupon 'the latter instinctively leads him to a nearby coffee hotel'. Here the following conversation ensues:

As God sipped the coffee, a divine demeanour of having drunk soma suffused His face.
"This is my divine handiwork", said God.
"This is not Your handiwork, but the hotelier's. Mixing chicory with coffee is his handiwork. Show your mettle when you pay the bill", whispered Kandasamy Pillai into His ears, content that he had sorted out the issue of paying for the coffee.
"Chicory...what's that?" God looked up quizzingly.
"Chicory powder resembles coffee, but is not coffee - like those who defraud people in the name of God", replied Kandasamy Pillai.

Coffee came to be closely associated with the upper caste, predominantly Brahmin, middle class. Its growing popularity led to the setting up of 'Brahmin coffee hotels' or 'coffee clubs', which served only coffee (in addition to snacks) and no other drink, in urban clusters. The coffee hotels, like coffee itself, also found their way into popular literature as we have seen in the excerpt from Pudumaippithan’s story. However, they came to be targetted - with success - by the Self-Respect or anti-Brahmin movement, which excoriated the obnoxious practice of keeping some seats out of bounds to all except Brahmins.

Coffee’s dominance among the Tamil middle class contrasts sharply with the universal popularity of tea elsewhere in India. In Tamil Nadu, tea is seen as a working class drink and a cultural 'other' of coffee. This perception has even entered the popular idiom so that somebody with a touch of the loony about them may be described as ‘a chap who drinks tea at a Brahmin hotel’!

Some of the other essays in the book are delightful as well. One of them is on the introduction of cartoons in Tamil newspapers, an influence carried over from the English Punch, which spawned an entire genre of Indian journals ambitiously named after the original as The Delhi Punch, The Punjab Punch, Urdu Punch, Gujarati Punch and so on. Among Tamil newspaper publications of the time, it was in the weekly, India, that cartoons were first introduced by its editor, the celebrated Subramania Bharati.

Another essay that stands out is Excising the Self: Writing Autobiography in Colonial Tamilnadu. Venkatachalapathy persuasively argues that autobiography as a literary phenomenon met with the popular approval of the Tamil audience only by the 1930s but was quickly appropriated by writers to provide a historical account of social transformation rather than scrutinise their own lives. This was an indigenisation of the western literary genre, which in its original form served as an expression of individuality and a narrative medium for reflection and self-realisation. The early autobiographies wove their themes around contrasting pictures of ‘those days’ and ‘these days’, producing a romantic narrative of a pristine past, whose order and social harmony was gradually chipped away by the rapid social and technological change permeating society in the wake of the colonial encounter.

In Those Days… offers a splendid peep into the life of the middle class citizenry of the colonial period, painting an evocative picture by drawing from popular literary sources of the time. In brilliantly capturing the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, from its unconventional sources, it shows that history is not the exclusive domain of the pedantic and the obscure. The lay person with an inquisitive mind may not only stake claim to it but also revel in the delight of its more accessible forms.

Bombay Dying?

For quite some time now, no news is good news as far as Mumbai is concerned. It is a case of the bride suffering from the attention of more than one overzealous suitor, each staking a violent, obsessive claim over the city and its people. New strictures are being regularly passed: who is welcome to the city and who is not; who can be criticised and who cannot; who belongs to the city and who does not. By common consent, tolerance is on nobody's 'Approved' list. Mumbai or Bombay is no longer a byword for cosmopolitanism.

Mumbai is a palimpsest, and traces remain of each of the various layers that make it what it is. The Koli tribesmen, who must surely be given their due as the original residents of what is now the city of Mumbai, are almost gone but not fully so. Ironically, adivasi families that have lived for generations together in what has come to be set aside as a national park in recent times - the abhorrently named Sanjay Gandhi National Park - are now treated as trespassers in their own territory, and are sought to be evicted by the government.

Within the national park, the Kanheri Caves, which are dated back to the period stretching from the 1st century BCE to the 9th century CE, offer ample proof of an extensive and well-organised Buddhist monastery. On the other side of the railway line, in the same suburb of Borivali, lies the Mandapeshwar rock-cut cave temple. Together with the cave-temple in Jogeshwari and the more elaborately sculpted caves in the island of Elephanta, these splendid specimens of art are a reminder of another era and people who lived and flourished in parts of what now comprise Bombay city and its suburbs.

Modern Bombay was shaped by the Europeans, chiefly the British 'servants' (which is what the staff were called) of the East India Company, which acquired it on lease from Charles II, the then English monarch, for a goodly loan plus annual rent, in or around the year 1668. It is of course, well-known that Charles II himself acquired the island of Bombay as a wedding gift when he married the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza.

While the British developed their possession into a port, it was not they alone that made the city. As it goes with port cities, Bombay attracted people of a multitude of ethnicities. By the early 19th century, Bombay was peopled by a mercantile community comprising, in addition to the British, Parsis, Marwaris, Konkani Muslims, Gujarati Banias, Bohras, Armenian and Indo-Portuguese. The city's growing prosperity attracted migrants from the hinterland.

Bombay's rise was concomitant with the decline of the port city of Surat, but its fortunes were really built upon the illegal opium trade with China. The merchants who smuggled opium into China had extensive networks and deep pockets, and for all their risks they were rewarded with windfall profits. It is another matter that these merchants who made their pile at the cost of Manchu China's deep misery were probably the 19th century prototypes of modern-day arms dealers that feed upon civil wars in the Third World to keep themselves in an extremely lucrative business. Some of the oldest family names in Indian business today, including the Tatas, may trace the origins of their business empires to the days of the opium trade.

It is interesting to find that there was a point of time in the late 1700s, before the opium trade took off, when Bombay, a town little other than a port in those days, was proposed to be shut down in view of the enormous drain it posed to the finances of the East India Company. Amar Farooqui, in his insightful book, Opium City, quotes the Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, who observed that the Company had ‘appropriated the whole of the surplus revenue of Banaras and Bahar (sic) to the support of Bombay’ but was nevertheless ‘obliged to send many lacs thither from Calcutta’, and went on to propose that the Company’s operations there be restricted to ‘just a small factory’. However, things were to take an altogether different turn.

By the mid-19th century, the city’s meteoric growth made it one of the foremost seats of the British Empire. In 1857 it acquired the distinction of being one of the three sites of India’s first modern universities with the establishment of the University of Bombay (now renamed University of Mumbai). This development, complemented by the existence of wealthy patrons, was germane to the setting up of a number of educational institutions, many of which exist even today. The rise of an educated Indian middle class and modern intelligentsia in Bombay and the other Presidency towns fed into the growth of Indian nationalism, an all-too-familiar story that needs no recounting.

Bombay’s political future came under question for the first time only after independence, when popular upsurge demanding the creation of linguistic states threatened to redraw the map of independent India. A States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) was appointed in 1954 to consider the demands from various parts of the country and to make recommendations to the Government of India. It is a matter of considerable interest that enormous heat was generated over the question of Bombay. Several prominent citizens of Bombay, counting among them luminaries such as JRD Tata, in addition to other industrialists, lawyers, scholars and doctors, organised themselves under the banner of the Bombay Citizens Committee, and printed a 200-page book as a submission to the SRC to argue that on the grounds of history, economic importance, multicultural character and geography, Bombay should be kept out of the state of Maharashtra that was being demanded by Marathi-speakers. In Parliament, the Bombay MP SK Patil went a step further to demand the creation of a separate self-governing city-state of Bombay. Totally opposed to this stand and vociferous in its demand for a state of Maharashtra with Bombay as its capital was the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (earlier Parishad), which drew support from members across the political spectrum, so that it included in its ranks, Congressmen, Communists, Jana Sanghis, Socialists as well as the towering constitution-maker, BR Ambedkar. It was alleged that the Bombay Citizens Committee was dominated by the Gujaratis, a major linguistic community in the city who were loath to see Bombay go to Maharashtra. Caught between the devil and the deep sea, the government of the day at the centre refrained from appeasing either side, choosing to retain a bilingual province of Bombay even as linguistic states were carved out elsewhere towards the end of 1956. For this the Congress paid a heavy price in the form of serious losses in the 1957 general elections and the subsequent municipal elections. Their hand forced, the Union Government finally settled the thorny issue with the creation of the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra on 1 May 1960. Bombay went to Maharashtra.

Mumbai today is a city where prince and pauper alike literally joust for space. This is only natural. With 16.38 million people, Mumbai is India’s most populous city. It holds at least 3 million more people than the second largest city, Kolkata, although it is two-and-a-half times smaller. Thus, Mumbai’s mind-boggling population density, at 22,000 persons per square kilometre, is incomparable with the corresponding figures for Maharashtra and all-India: 315 and 324 respectively. Inevitably, housing is a severe problem. Between 55 to 60 per cent of the city’s population lives in slums, in highly degrading living conditions. Or to put it differently, less than five people out of ten live in a proper house.

Commuting is a daily nightmare. Despite the large numbers of private vehicles that keep the city’s roads perpetually clogged, public transport accounts for 88% of daily commuting. The suburban rail system, which ferries 6.4 million commuters across the length of the city everyday, is hopelessly overstretched. On an average, four people die and four more are injured in accidents on railway tracks every single day. An average of 824 people falls off local trains every year. And all this is just getting worse in a city where planners failed to wake up in time to the mammoth logistical problems confronting them, and have seen them worsen with the passage of time.

While organised crime and corruption in the police ranks may not touch citizens’ lives everyday, the scale they have attained is deeply worrisome for a democratic, civilized society. They are so deeply entrenched that for many years now they have become a common subject of portrayal, sometimes essayed with bone-chilling realism, in Hindi films produced out of the same city. Yet, their detailed exploration in some recent popular books, for example, Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found, the narrative non-fiction work by Suketu Mehta, and Shantaram, an autobiographical novel, leave the reader shocked and aghast. These factors combine with Mumbai’s sheer population density to make it a prospective terrorist’s delight. It has already suffered two major terror attacks, apart from several smaller ones, since 1993 – and continues to remain extremely vulnerable.

To these existing woes have been added political ones, with deep sectarian and communal colourings. Although their presence is not something new, their continued existence and intensification in recent times do not bode well for the metropolis. The political factors in play have sought to create mythical icons with attributes that defy fact and to enforce a rigid, narrow discipline accompanied by broad definitions of what might constitute an infraction. Today, the remark of a critical journalist; tomorrow, a scene in a particular movie or play and on another day, the exchange of greeting cards – all are subject to the whims of a clumsy moral discipline, with any ‘infringement’ being met with swift, violent retribution. In many ways, Mumbai is India’s own Wild West. Given the resort to violence at the drop of a hat, one may very well doubt the existence of a laboriously compiled constitution in the country, drafted, ironically, by a Maharashtrian who was also a resident of the city.

The mark of a flourishing civilization is its openness to the winds that blow from different directions. The great universities of the world, whether in the East or the West, sought to attract and welcomed talent from other lands. This practice holds good to the present day. The decline of the sophisticated Indus Valley civilization has been attributed by some historians to the trenchant hold of the priestly class, which upheld traditional forms of art and craft and treated innovation as near-felony. Likewise, the fall of the Mughal Empire is traced not merely to the bigoted Aurangzeb, but even further back to his father, Shah Jahan. On one hand, the latter abandoned the creative, pluralist outlook of his grandfather, Akbar, which had encouraged the flowering of native talent; on the other, his wars with the Persians and the Uzbegs effectively plugged the flow of immigrants from Central Asia, so that an important source of new ideas and thoughts that had enriched India over the centuries dried up. There are lessons here for the men and women who seek to rule over a city that is dangerously slipping in the direction of inexorable decline.

In 1954, when the question of Bombay was being hotly debated, the two sparring sides sought to arrive at an understanding. Shankarrao Deo, President of the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad met Sir Purushottamdas Thakur of the Bombay Citizens Committee, and said that while the central demand of Bombay for Maharashtra could not be given up, he was very much agreeable to preserving the ‘autonomous character of the metropolitan city [and] ensuring its cosmopolitan life’.

Few of the trumpeters who lay narrow claims to Mumbai today are likely to know of this compromise once offered as a price for the city; fewer still are likely to care for it.

References:

Samir S. Patel, Mumbai's Rough-Hewn Legacy, Archaelogy, Archaelogy Institute of America, 4 April 2007. Available at www.archaeology.org/online/features/mandapeshwar/

Nick Robbins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, (Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2006)

Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay, (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2006)

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, (Picador India, 2007)

Manorama Yearbook 2007, (Kottayam: Malayala Manorama Co. Ltd., 2007)

Dionne Bunsha, Torture Trains, Frontline, 4 January 2008

Abraham Eraly, Gem in the Lotus: The Seeding of Indian Civilisation (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000)

Abraham Eraly, Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000)