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Coffee hotel
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Excerpted from A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History.
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With the widespread use of coffee in Tamil society, a new institution, popularly referred to as ‘coffee hotel’ or ‘coffee club’, which served coffee (and not tea) along with what was called ‘tiffin’ emerged in the towns and cities of Tamil Nadu. This phenomenon was noticed and commented upon from the 1920s well until the 1950s…
These coffee hotels were so popular and such money-spinning enterprises that the satirist Kuttoosi Guruswamy, the ideologue of the Dravidian movement, likened them ‘to printing currency notes in one’s own press’…
A.K. Chettiar, a keen observer of contemporary culture, wrote in a lighter vein: Some find it difficult to cajole their wives to entertain friends at home. Such persons seek refuge in coffee hotels. The coffee hotel is not just an eating joint. In villages it is a place of congregation. In towns it is the place where traders clinch deals. Wage earners, school-going students and sub-editors, who down ‘half a cup’ by the hour — all depend on the coffee hotel. There are people who, sick of homemade food, go to eat at these hotels with their family every week… Moreover, what can one do when visitors turn up without notice?...
What is missing in this account, however, is the fact that the coffee hotel was generally run by Brahmins and, in the popular mind, was associated with brahmins…
Not only coffee, but also the coffee hotel was closely identified with Brahmins, even if they happened to be fallen ones. I would suggest that the attribute of the fall was only a way of articulating the ambivalence about the Brahmin’s negotiation with modernity. The complaint that coffee hotels were unclean was repeated ad nauseam by many contemporary middle-class observers: cups got reused without proper rinsing; the milk was adulterated; the waiters and cooks were dirty; the unclean ambience aided the spread of contagious diseases…
Such complaints only go to show their cultural anxiety at an institution, which was negotiating in its own way the demands made by modern living in an urban context.
While such critics couched their cultural anxiety about loss of caste in the dubious language of health and sanitation, nationalists like G.A. Natesan were taking pride over “how quietly yet, effectively (coffee hotels) have levelled up distinction! Could education or legislation have done that work with equal rapidity?”…
Reproduced from In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History; Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2008, with the permission of the author.
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