A social history of the consumption of coffee in India, 19th-20th century New proposed title: Drink it The Damn Way We Want: The Politics of the Consumption of Coffee in India since the 19th century

• Applicant: Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Asian Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 316688479

This research will explore the trajectory of coffee as a commodity and its consumption in the domestic market in India, a subject that has not been analyzed systematically so far. It is little known that coffee has a longer history than tea in India. Yet, though a latecomer, tea is considered to be the national drink. The current project aims at sketching a long term history of the consumption of coffee since the introduction of large scale production of the commodity in India in the 1830s in order to understand where the commodity stands in the hierarchy of hot beverages, if there has been a change in the social attitude towards the commodity, who the consumers of coffee have been, and to analyze the politics of consumption in the sense what guides the choice of a particular beverage. The hypothesis guiding this research is that as a foreign exchange earner, coffee has historically been meant for the export market, the domestic market being systematically addressed for the first time in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929. In the post-World War II era, when new markets were opened to Indian coffee, the domestic market was relegated to the background again till the MNC run cafe chains entered the Indian market. One peculiarity of the Indian coffee market is that just as in the 1930s in the 1990s also the coffee industry addressed the urban educated Anglicized middle class. Now, when India is said to be in the grip of a coffee culture, the emphasis is still on the consumption of the commodity in public spaces. The project will study the official records of the coffee industry and records produced by coffee planters in the colonial and post-colonial period, commercials in the media and literature in regional languages and carry on anthropological research among local operators in the market and urban consumers in order to find out how consumption, private and public, has featured in the agenda of the coffee industry. Exploring the role of the state, the industry, and the agency of the actors on the supply and demand side, the current project intends to contribute to the relatively new genre of the history of consumption in South Asia, with reference to the history of the consumption of coffee in India in particular, and to the larger sociological discourse on consumption and the consumer.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants