Far from the tastefully decorated interiors with the loud music and the pastries display in glass cases, lies the memory of time. It is present in the ‘patina’ of age on the walls, tables, fans and the ambiance of the Indian Coffee Houses. They are, as Stuart Freedman observes, through his perceptive lenses, among the few links that survive between the cities and towns of post-Independence India and those of modern India.
Stepping into the coffee houses that Stuart captures in 40 photographs in the exhibition ‘The Palaces of Memory — Tales From The Indian Coffee House’, is almost like stepping back in time. ‘The Palaces of Memory’, which is supported by Dauble, was recently on display at Tasveer in Bengaluru. It will travel to Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai for the rest of its pan-Indian tour. The photographs are also available in the form of a book published as part of the collaboration.
“The Indian Coffee House was a bit of a sanctuary in my early years. Working in India was a place of refuge, a place away from the chaos of the streets of Delhi. When I arrived in the early 90s on assignment in India, I would seek out the coffee houses. They were, I suppose, reminiscences, aide memoirs, of my past in London,” says the British photographer, over the phone from his hometown. Stuart Freedman is a photographer and writer, whose work has been published in publications such as Life , Time , National Geographic , Der Spiegel , Newsweek , and Paris Match .
“The streets in my neighbourhood were navigated by rough pubs and cheap cafes. The Indian Coffee Houses reminded me of those cafes. They helped me see India as something less than foreign, something familiar.” In that way, he says, he talks about the Indian Coffee House as a translational device. “I didn’t photograph them until 2009 and 2010 because they were simply places to sit and think and talk to people.”
He first photographed the Indian Coffee House in New Delhi when they were about to shut operations. “I thought I should do it for posterity. Once I started digging into history, I realised how integral to the history of post and pre-independence India it was. I made a piece for a German magazine just on the Indian Coffee House.”
When his assignments took him to Jaipur and Kolkata, he captured the coffee houses there too. “After a while, I realised I had work enough for a book, or a longer piece certainly.”
It finally turned into a book, titled The Palaces of Memory, published by Tasveer and Dauble. The book features a foreword by Amit Chaudhuri and an essay by Stuart on the coffee houses. “It is a recollection of everyday life in the coffee house. I have used a narrative structure that spans across a day — from morning to evening. This is easiest to do both visually and in terms of the words,” he says.
“What I have tried to capture are those quiet moments, these are some interesting personal moments in the coffee house. A lot of the photography in India is about the extraordinary and the exotic. What I was trying to do, what I tried to do for 20 years in India and Africa, was to show that these places are exactly the same as where I come from.” He does this by sharing ‘little, personal human moments’ as he finds the coffee houses ‘full of them’. His work is also an attempt to show the ‘everyday India’, something that most people, he finds, from other countries in the world don’t see or recognise.
“Indians take the coffee house for granted. When you see something every day and go to it every day, you don’t sense its value. It’s easy to miss how interesting the coffee houses are, both visually and in terms of the people that go there.” Stuart says the coffee houses have taught him a great deal about everyday life in Delhi.
“Not that I’m pretending to know everything, as a Western journalist, about India. In my opinion, the coffee houses, especially within the context of modern India (and I’m choosing my words carefully) are vital, because they hold within them the memories of a different time, the memories of a historical India,” he says.
“They hold within, memories of an Indian that was based on community, not necessarily commerce. They are repositories of a culture that would be worth preserving.”
