Café Culture
Most Pakistanis assume coffee is a western beverage and tea
is Pakistani. In fact the opposite is true. Coffee was introduced by the Arab
Muslims, and tea was introduced to South Asia by the British.
A young Ethiopian herder called Kaldi noticed his herd was
acting frisky after eating berries from a bush
in the Kaffa region. Others claim coffee was discovered in Yemen . It soon
became associated with Sufis who drank coffee to stay awake during the long
hours of dhikr.
James Grierson’s The History of Coffee , claims the first coffee houses were established in Makkah- public
places where Muslims could socialize and discuss religious matters.
As Islam spread, so did the love of coffee – to Turkey, Syria
and Egypt and across the Mediterranean. . Legend has it that a pilgrim, Baba
Budan, smuggled coffee beans out of Makkah, to his home in Mysore where he
successfully cultivated coffee plants.
In the 17th Century, the Dutch smuggled a coffee
plant out of Mocha in Yemen. Soon colonizers commercialized coffee cultivation,
and the beverage became popular all across Europe and then the Americas.
Around 2700 BC the Chinese Emperor Shennong was sipping a bowl of boiled water. The breeze
dropped in a few leaves from a nearby tree, and he loved the refreshing taste. It
came to be known as tê in Min Chinese and chá in Mandarin. Tea travelled down
the silk route and soon chaikhanas sprung up everywhere . Once again it was the
colonisers that established extensive tea plantations, with India
becoming the largest tea producer.
The English added milk and sugar to black tea or khave . An
elite beverage, it wasn’t till the 1930s when William McKercher developed a
machine to crush, tear and curl tea leaves, that it became affordable for the
masses. The India Tea Board initiated an aggressive advertising campaigns to
popularize tea. Surprisingly it wasn’t till the 50s that tea really became the
favourite beverage for South Asians.
However, the real revolution was
the establishment of coffee houses and tea rooms. Unlike the ale houses whose alcoholic
drinks were depressants, coffee and tea were stimulants that sharpened the
mind. The social mix of clientele, generated
an authentic exchange of ideas. The coffeehouse played a crucial role in the
birth of the Age of Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions and the
Anti War movement of the 60s. The call to storm the Bastille started at Paris's
Café de Foy. Isaac Newton dissected a dolphin, Darwin developed his theories of
evolution, the New York Bank and Stock Exchange were planned in Coffee houses. Lloyd’s
of London in fact started out as a coffee house. Café de Flore was the meeting
place for writers and artists in Paris. The coffee houses of Oxford were called
penny universities–the cost of a coffee.
Karachi’s Zelin's Coffee House,
Pioneer Coffee House, Café Parisian and others had their own literary
clientele. Lahore’s Pak Tea House , founded by Boota Singh in 1940 as The India
Tea House, was the birthplace of the Progressive Writers' Association,
frequented by the literary giants of Pakistan.
The open discussions at coffee houses alarmed those in power.
Englands’s Charles II, and the Ottoman Sultan
Murad IV tried unsuccessfully to shut them down. Spies mingled with the clientele
to gather intelligence, but the charm of Café life flourished from Tangiers to
Karachi.
The Irani tea shops of Karachi, Bombay and Hyderabad Deccan,
first established by Iranian Parsis and Muslims escaping the drought in
Khairabad and Yazd in the 19th century, became the haunt of
journalists, businessmen and students.
While Dhabas, which began as a stop for transporters, have
taken over the tea drinking culture, they all display prominent signs
prohibiting political talk. The most exciting Pakistani tea news became its
endorsement by Indian air force pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman, captured by
Pakistani forces.
The demise of the café culture may have begun with
commercial franchises like Starbucks, but was sealed by the arrival of social
media, the new “meeting place”. One can speculate that the intelligentsia
became atomized and lost their link with the street. The world lost the
dynamic, creative energy generated by the café culture.
Durriya Kazi
Karachi
December 6, 2021
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