In Those Days There was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History by A.R. Venkatachalapathy

I had been searching for this book for quite a long time and got hold of this last week.

Book Cover

Reasons for searching for it – my interest in food writing, coffee, history and south India. And yes, I had heard about the author in my university days. Well, the book did not disappoint me. I had read about the history of tea in the book I reviewed earlier: Curry. Coffee had something different to offer.

We read enough about how coffee houses became cultural institutions in Western history, how coffee was taken as a drink that stinks to how it became a drink of prestige. This book tells you about South Indian history. The book comes in the larger context of cultural practices of consumption. Coffee, Tobacco, Cartoons, Modernity.

Coffee, the stereotype of Tamil Nadu and South India, is not an innocent icon – the book tells us. Again, it was also one of the material for the elite to process and negotiate modernity, in some sense. From a drink that corrupted the women and the youth, it became a symbol of hospitality and cultural attainment. Coffee clubs turn modern spaces.

There were a few essays on literature, which I skipped. But I was also surprised to see that a book on coffee could completely avoid the most common person who brings the coffee to the drinker, the housewife. Yes, there are a couple of references to how other men deplored the coffee-addiction of women and hints at the Partha Chatterjee bifurcation of the cultural and the political. But wont there be more in history – like how did the women start making coffee, did they welcome the new product or resisted it, did coffee come to houses from hotels or the other way round? Which women started making coffee for men, community, caste?

The parallel between histories of coffee and tobacco is also interesting. Both came to India and became part of India. But when coffee was appropriated by the elite, though with lots of resistance from the conservatives, tobacco after an era of eulogies and celebration, became completely a corruption.

You need not be a historian to read this book. If you happen to be one, this is a must-read.