From the Arabian peninsula in the fifteenth century to the United States in the twentieth, coffeehouses have been a place where political and cultural dissidents gather to get jittery and talk about big ideas. As sociologist Kristin Plys writes, that was also true in India in 1975, when the country plunged into dictatorship and dissenters gathered at the Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place in New Delhi.
Plys writes that the coffee house was part of a chain with a radical history. It was founded as Coffee House by a British colonial marketer in 1936. A decade later, three Communist workers at the location in Calicut (Kozhikode) circulated a pamphlet titled “Coffee House Labourers are Also Human Beings” at all the company’s locations, leading to political actions in which workers claimed their places of employment as Indian Coffee Houses. In 1957, after years of political action and debate, and a fifteen-day sit-down strike, Indian Coffee House was registered as a cooperative society.
People who spent time at the Connaught Place location in the 1960s and ’70s told Plys that it was a “glamorous” place. Sitting politicians would visit to answer questions posed by everyone from Communist Party members to right-wing Hindu nationalists. Poets, musicians, scientists, and other artists and intellectuals would discuss their ideas about societal transformation. Because it was a cooperative, people were free to hang out long after they’d finished their coffee.
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When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of public emergency in 1975, normally boisterous outdoor meeting spaces, public buses, and pubs suddenly went quiet. Even at universities and in trade union meetings, people feared arrest, torture, and death if they voiced anti-government views.
“India became a different society then,” one socialist journalist told Plys.
But conversations at the Indian Coffee House continued. With newspapers censored, journalists and activists would gather there to share news by word of mouth or with pamphlets and poems.
“If you went there, you could find out who had been arrested during the previous night, you could learn the latest news, and you could even meet those who were actively engaged in countering the dictatorship,” Plys writes.
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Why was the location permitted to stay open while other sites of public political discussion were violently suppressed? Some of Plys’s interviewees suspected it was because members of Gandhi’s Congress Party had also found a place there. In particular, older members who had been active in India’s independence movement valued having a space where free discussion was possible.
But that came to an end in January of 1976, when Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, had the coffee house bulldozed. After that, another Indian Coffee House location opened nearby. But Plys’s sources said that only the socialist and communist contingents reestablished themselves there. The centrist and right-wing intellectuals largely dropped their oppositional politics while the left became insular and weakened. Many of the interviewees viewed that as part of a chain of events that ultimately led to the increasing power of the right in Indian politics in the decades since.
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