The Indian Coffee House (ICH), a network of worker-owned cafeterias started in the 1940s, is the subject of a new book by writer-photographer Stuart Freedman. The Palaces of Memory charts the best of Freedman’s photographs taken over five years at more than 30 of these colonial-era meeting places.
A photo-journalist for more than 25 years, with experience in over 60 countries, Freedman has been based out of India and London for the last eight years.
Freedman started photographing coffee houses in 2010, when he found that the Delhi café was facing closure. In Palaces of Memory , he has avoided the trap of glamorising poverty and exotica, and has instead, tried to make his book an exploration of the ordinary.
Excerpts from an email interview:
What inspiredThe Palaces of Memory? And why the choice of ‘Palace’ for a ‘House’?
A: I discovered the Indian Coffee House in New Delhi when I first came to India in 1995. By that time, I’d already worked in South Asia in Pakistan, and I’d covered the Siege of Kabul. But Delhi struck me as deeply confusing and chaotic. The Coffee House was a refuge from the stares and strangeness of the streets.
I came, nervous at first — careful of the regulars, unsure of the city, but it was to me an echo of the cosy fug of the cafés that I had grown up with in London. I recognised the chipped cups, the faded décor, and in that sense, it took me back to my days of youth in Hackney (now an area of London that is the trendiest in Europe — then a byword for inner city poverty) that were spent growing up in a grim tower block, long since demolished.
In a sense, I had come full circle. The Coffee House taught me a very valuable lesson; that the people were the same as the people of my Hackney past.
Both the Indian coffee houses and the cafés of my youth were simultaneously full of hope and defeat. Both had been significant in the post-war culture of their respective countries — in India, the Indian coffee houses or their forerunners were integral to and part of, the Independence movement and subsequently spoke of that Nehruvian moment that is now passing.
The greasy-spoon cafés in London were part of the post-war counter-culture that was the coffee bars of the 1950s and 60s — playgrounds of the young and restless. These were the places where rock and roll and revolution had been plotted, but also where working-class families might come for a simple treat.
When I travelled within India on assignment, I sought out Indian coffee houses and they never disappointed. In a sense, the coffee houses were translational devices for me. As a journalist, they enabled me to have a ‘way into’ India and were always wonderful places to take the temperature of the street.
However, the coffee houses, for me, were never part of some nostalgia of an older India. I have no Raj-era romance about India, and the pictures that I’ve tried to make in this work don’t pander to the usual stereotypes. This book is about ordinary people living ordinary lives and is a love letter to them.
The coffee house or watering hole has traditionally been associated with revolutionary developments. Do you think such gathering places still havesignificance in an era of crowd sourcing and flash mobs?
A: Coffee houses, generally, were political. The British, finding that international coffee prices were falling, started selling coffee to the Indians. The places that eventually came up as coffee houses — like the one on Kolkata’s College Street — became haunts of those dedicated to Independence. In a sense, they became a de facto bourgeois public space — analogous, I think, to the Left Bank Cafés in Paris and the Ahwas of Cairo. They were however — and remain to some extent — simply addas , the Bengali word for a place of meeting and discussion.
These coffee houses remain part of that tradition, whatever happens with Western style coffee shops. Moreover, they remain places of debate and discussion: modern coffee franchises are about monetising space and time — the coffee is expensive and one can’t linger.
After the closure threat in Delhi, the publicity meant that people remembered their old, rather broken, coffee house (as I say in the book “A black-and-white movie in an era of 3-D. A palace of mid-century modernism. Broken but still standing.”), and these days, with all the students, it’s difficult to get a seat after 4 p.m. The same goes for the place in Kolkata — it’s always busy. I’ve found both places full of young people talking politics with an older generation — something that you won’t find in Western-style coffee chains — so clearly, there still is a significance.
With foreign coffee shop chains aggressively marketing Net-savvy lounge-and-snacking concepts to Indian consumers, do you think the local industry has a huge challenge of getting a rapid image makeover?
A: The book isn’t really about how the ICH can compete against the multinational chains, but I think that the ICH’s historical and cultural significance should be trumpeted; it’s something that they and the whole country should be proud of, and promote a bit more.
What was the most interesting/unusual experience you went through while writing this book?
A: Many. I’d never photographed the Indian Coffee House in New Delhi until I heard that it was threatened with closure in 2010. For me, it was a quiet place where I could think: the media interest made me realise just how significant this, and subsequently all the coffee houses, were. I did an assignment for a German magazine and wrote a 5,000-word piece on the history and politics of the place. Also, I crucially photographed it for the first time.
A year or so later, after I had photographed the Coffee House in Jaipur (again on assignment), I decided that the scope of the work was big enough for a book. I don’t think there was ever an unusual experience in my couple of years doing that, but I was constantly touched by the kindness and generosity of both customers and staff, who let me into their worlds.
All photographs are fromThe Palaces of Memoryby Stuart Freedman (Dewi Lewis Publishing).
