Indian Coffee House

Did You Know?

• There are 13 co-operative societies in the country to run the coffee houses.
• The societies are governed by managing committees elected from the employees.
• The societies are affiliated under All India Coffee Workers' Co-operative Societies Federation formed 17 December 1960.

History

Consumption of Turkish coffee in the Mughal court is attested from the 16th century, and coffeehouses called 'qahwa khanas' existed in Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) and Lucknow. Domestic cultivation and consumption of coffee in Dutch India, Portuguese India, and French India from the 18th century was also observed. The idea of an 'Indian Coffee House' chain formed in the late 1890s. The Coffee Cess Committee started the India Coffee House chain, and the first outlet, then named India Coffee House, opened in Churchgate, Bombay in 1936, operated by the Indian Coffee Board.

By the 1940s nearly 50 Coffee Houses existed across British India. After partition, Pakistan inherited branches in its major cities. In the mid-1950s the Coffee Board decided to close the Coffee Houses. Encouraged by communist leader A. K. Gopalan, workers compelled the Board to hand over outlets to them, forming Indian Coffee Workers' Co-operatives and renaming the network Indian Coffee House.

A co-operative began in Bangalore on 19 August 1957, and one in Delhi on 27 December 1957. Bellary and Madras Societies later separated. In October 2018, Indian Coffee House opened its 8th branch of Jabalpur.

Branches

In Kerala, the Indian Coffee House is run by two separate cooperative societies. The first, the India Coffee Board Workers' Co-operative Society Ltd. No.4227 in Thrissur, was founded on 10 February 1958. Its first outlet opened in Thrissur on 8 March 1958, making it the fourth Indian Coffee House in the country. This society now operates over 50 branches across the districts of Thrissur, Ernakulam, Idukki, Kottayam, Pathanamthitta, Alappuzha, Kollam, and Thiruvananthapuram.

The founders of the Kerala Indian Coffee Houses were Advocate T. K. Krishnan, a Communist leader from Thrissur, and N. S. Parameswaran Pillai, who was the State Secretary of the India Coffee Board Labour Union and a former employee who had been dismissed from the Coffee House. The second society, the Indian Coffee Workers' Co-operative Society Ltd. No. 4317 in Kannur, was established on 2 July 1958. Its first outlet began operations on 7 August 1958 in Thalasserry.

This society runs more than 25 branches in the districts of Kasaragod, Kannur, Kozhikode, Malappuram, and Palakkad. A Malayalam book titled Coffee Housinte Katha (History of Coffee House) by N. S. Parameswaran Pillai, writing under the pen name Nadakkal Parameswaran Pillai, is the only published history of the Indian Coffee House movement in any language. It won the Abu Dhabi Shakthi Award for best autobiography in 2007. Coffee House outlets in Kerala are known for using beetroot extensively in their dishes.

N. S. Parameswaran Pillai (1931–2010) co-founded the Kerala Indian Coffee Houses with T. K. Krishnan. Born on 25 May 1931 in Pallippuram, Alappuzha, he left school after the fourth standard due to poverty. He worked many jobs—construction worker, cook, hotel bearer, peanut and pan vendor, coir factory worker, water boy at Cochin Harbour, ration depot clerk, and advocate’s clerk—before becoming a daily-wage last-grade employee at the Coffee Board’s India Coffee House in Ernakulam in 1945.

In the late 1940s, he became a trade unionist and was a founding member and secretary of the India Coffee Board Labour Union.