Revolution in the cafe

A REVOLUTION may not be a tea party, as the late Chairman Mao once observed with some asperity, but revolutions of various kinds - political and intellectual, painterly and literary - have had their beginning in conversations around a tea table, in cafes and bistros. An immunity to surprise, which is our foremost characteristic as metropolitan creatures, numbs us to the sheer novelty of the cafe. So completely do we take this convenient oasis for granted, especially in a busy and irreflective city like Bombay, that we forget just how recently it was added to the repertoire of social venues available in Indian society.

The story of the Bombay cafe as an amenity, as a basic eatery, begins in the mid-19th Century. As the economic structures of the colonial city began to develop and expand, it became inevitable that the majority of people would have to work outside their homes and beyond the purview of their traditional caste and ethnic groups, often travelling to their work place and eating outside the home. Around these seemingly quotidian phenomena of commuting and eating, there developed a whole new sociology of urban interaction.

As time passed, the patterns of migrant labour, the shift system and the skewed geography of the island-city ensured that it was no longer possible, as it had been in the palmy days when the city had been neatly divided into the twin-diagram of the Fort and the Native Town, for people to go home for lunch. Indeed, many people had no particular home to go to, in the sense of a private space of intimate being, apart from digs, hostels and chummeries, a situation that continues in Bombay today. If people had to eat outside their homes, someone would have to provide the venue.

In the earliest days of Bombay's development, caste and ethnic proprieties were sought to be maintained, with restaurants catering to particular groups, using their own caste-fellows as cooks and so forth (there are, even today, survivals of this genre of eatery); the other option was to arrange for home-made lunch to be delivered from one's home, giving rise to the resilient institution of the dabbawallah or lunch-delivery man.

But the levelling processes of the market economy soon altered this attempted transposition of rural society onto the urban cartography of life and work: the exigencies of work place location, business timings, mass transport and the changing organisation of social relationships rendered the traditional norms of social division obsolete.

By the beginning of the 20th Century, moreover, Bombay witnessed an influx of migrant Iranis, most of them Zoroastrians from Persia's eastern provinces of Yazd and Kerman: these tough survivors, fleeing the deprivation and repression unleashed by the Qajar dynasty in its final, decadent phase, proved to be gifted entrepreneurs in their new place of refuge. They stepped into the corner shops of new buildings, which superstitious local traders would not touch, and turned them into cafes. Since the Iranis were outsiders to the local dissensions and controversies, their cafes were neutral ground: everyone was equally welcome there, and no definite social and political distinctions prevailed.

Places like the Irani cafe were a social necessity, but they also orchestrated a social revolution. For they made it possible for individuals to eat together in a common space largely unmarked by the boundaries of ethnicity, denomination and caste. Just as the railways had broken down the taboos on touch, with people getting over their social inhibitions while jostling one another on trains that were not divided into caste-based compartments, the cafes broke down the rules of commensality: people learned to share a table with members of other castes or religions, a radical move in traditional Indian society.

The cafes went on to provide a forum for discussion and leisure, despite such stern Irani restaurant injunctions as "No Discussion" and "Do Not Linger". In the cafe, people could meet as free-floating, free-thinking individuals, rather than as envoys of the social groups to which they happened to belong.

By emphasising the voluntary nature of these human associations, the cafe became a symbol of freedom and liberalism: like its forerunners in Paris and Vienna, the cafe in Bombay began to act as a site, over the 1930s and 1940s, for the formation and circulation of new ideas and opinions in a new public sphere.

Reflecting the momentum of the Gandhian nationalist struggle for liberation from colonial rule, as well as the exciting currents of Communist, socialist and artistic-literary avant-garde activity, the cafe in Bombay became a base for the creation of new, trans-ethnic, pre-eminently urban communities.

In later generations, the coffee house would serve as a place where writers and film-makers, painters and critics could meet, share their thoughts, read to each other: in the films of the 1950s and 1960s, the cafe bulks large as a recurrent motif and locale, as the site of fantasy and romance, but also as the place where the marginalised poet or the optimistic dreamer finds solace from the cynicism and cruelty of the big city. The novelist and philosopher Raja Rao certainly had this model in mind when he presided over the Chetana restaurant in Bombay's Kala Ghoda precinct, nearly five decades ago, with its chessboard tables; that tradition is kept alive today by restaurants like the Samovar and the Wayside Inn.

Many of Bombay's old Irani cafes vanished over the 1990s, with their laid-back owners and relaxed clientele, victims of a fast- track economy: other clienteles, other systems of belief have taken their place, in the form of gimcrack jukebox parlours or high-end gourmet palaces. As against the high-pitched youth culture of the one and the self-conscious affluence quotient of the other, both manifestations of the Age of Consumerism, the old-style cafe symbolised a phase of liberalism, a moment in the life-cycle of a civil society, which is under considerable threat at the moment.

For the cafe was truly an embodiment of an Age of Access: not the one celebrated by economist Jeremy Rifkin in his eponymous study of the virtual networks that dominate our lives, but an earlier Age of Access in which the market was not closed off to those without the purchasing power to enter it, and where the fora of the public sphere were not locked against those without the requisite passwords.

The Starbucks outlet, which surely lies in the near future of the Indian metropolis, will have a far greater range of coffees than the Irani cafe could ever hope to provide; but the Starbucks can never hope to match the Irani as a guarantee of democracy. The gradual disappearance of the Irani cafe is only another index of how, even as we pirouette through an ever-widening theatre of options as consumers, we pay for this delirium of choice as citizens, by ceding our freedom to the states and corporations that puppet-master us from behind the scenes.

RANJIT HOSKOTE

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