Tag Archives: India Coffee House

A coffee house in the Indian city of Bangalore (Bengaluru)

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GOING THROUGH SOME old photographs today, I came across a few taken in the India Coffee House that used to be on Bangalore’s MG Road. Here is what I wrote about the place in my book “Coracles and Crocodiles: 101 Tales of India”:

“When I first visited Bangalore in 1994, there was a coffee house on Mahatma Gandhi (‘MG’) Road close to the now derelict Srungar Shopping Complex. This venerable, popular ‘hole in the wall’ was a branch of the Indian Coffee House (‘ICH’) chain. In both appearance and atmosphere, it reminded me of some of the older coffee houses I had seen Belgrade and Sarajevo in Yugoslavia (when it still existed).

At the ICH, customers sat at old wooden tables on wooden benches with hard, upright backrests. Old Coffee Board (‘ICB’) posters hung on the walls. The waiters were dressed in white jackets and trousers held up by extremely wide red and gold belts – like cummerbunds – with huge metal buckles that bore the logo of the ICB. These gentlemen wore white turbans with red and gold ribbons on their heads. In addition to (in my humble opinion) rather average quality, but low-priced South Indian filter coffee, a variety of snacks and cold drinks were also on the menu.

During the British occupation of India, admission to most coffee houses was restricted to European clients. In the late 1890s, the idea of establishing an ICH chain of coffee houses for Indian customers began to be considered. In 1936, the ICB opened the first ICH in Bombay’s Churchgate area. By the 1940s, there were at least 50 branches all over what was then British India. In the mid-1950s, the ICHs were closed by the Coffee Board. The Communist leader AK Gopalan (1904-1977) and the Coffee Board workers managed to get the Board to hand over the ICH outlets to them, and they formed a series of Indian Coffee Workers’ Co-operatives. The cooperative in Bangalore was formed in August 1957. There are now several branches in the city. The MG Road branch, which opened in 1959, closed in 2009 … “

DISCOVER more about this and many other things I have experienced in India by reading my book, which is available from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/CORACLES…/dp/B0DJZ6DMYB

Rabindranath Tagore, blood, and coffee in Calcutta

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THERE IS A BRANCH of the India Coffee House chain in College Street, Calcutta. Housed on the first and second floors of Albert Hall (built 1876 in memory of Victoria’s Prince Consort), it is located in the midst of a vast bazaar specialising in bookselling – mainly textbooks and technical manuals. Soon after it was opened, the coffee house within Albert Hall became a centre of anti-British agitation.

The first floor serving area – many chairs and tables – is overlooked by two huge portraits. One photograph depicts Rabindranath Tagore as a young man and next to this, there is another of the poet and writer Kazi Nazrul Islam. Other smaller painted portraits line the walls of the café. Waiters wearing pugrees busily wandered around taking orders and delivering food and drinks – mostly coffee.

This ninth of January (2024) was a special day when an annual blood donation camp was held in memory of the Bengali footballer Sailendra Nath Manna (1924-2012). It was, as we discovered today, being carried out on the second floor gallery overlooking the serving area of the College Street India Coffee House.

Loudspeakers within the coffee house and in the streets surrounding it were exhorting people to come and donate some blood. A steady stream of volunteers climbed the staircase to the second floor. One of the officials, who was having coffee at a table near us, suggested we took a look upstairs.

The gallery was full of people. Chairs lined the walls. Donors were sitting in these with catheters in their veins. Several medics were wandering about with stethoscopes around their necks. Those who had donated blood were given packages contains bottled water and snacks. There were a few folding beds ready for anyone who fainted or collapsed during or after they had given blood, but these were unoccupied. Despite the seriousness of the purpose of the occasion, the blood donation camp seemed more like a joyous fair or party than a clinical situation.

We had come to College Street to enjoy the historic ambience of the old coffee house. Little had we expected to come acros a blood donation festival within it.