Centuries after a farmer named Baba Budan (characterised as a sufi in other versions of this story) is believed to have started the cultivation of coffee in India by smuggling in green coffee beans from Yemen (which tightly controlled the commodity, allowing trade only in roasted beans), Indian coffee is getting its share of the global spotlight. India’s coffee exports crossed the $1 billion mark — for the first time ever — in the current financial year. This won’t surprise committed domestic consumers of homegrown Arabica and Robusta: India’s shade-grown coffee, after all, is as aromatic and full-bodied as the most demanding javaphile might desire.
While India’s numbers are not close to matching those of major producers like Brazil and Vietnam, the development is heartening considering the resistance coffee faced in the country until the early 20th century. Sample this letter that an aggrieved resident of what was then called Madras shot off to the Young India magazine in 1921: “The greatest obstacle in the way of success to our [non-cooperation] movement in Madras are our women… a very large number of the high class Brahman ladies have become addicted to many of the Western vices. They drink coffee not less than three times a day, and consider it very fashionable to drink more.” The puritanical dislike of a “foreign” drink, as historian AR Venkatachalapathy has recorded, disappeared once Tamil elites adopted the drink as a way of distinguishing themselves from the “lower castes” who drank fermented rice water.
Currently, India is in the midst of what is known as the “third wave” of coffee culture, where the focus is on the artistry and knowledge that goes into a good coffee, all the way from bean to cup. It’s hard being the runner-up in what is mostly still a tea-drinking nation, but the days when the only place to get a decent cuppa was the local branch of the Indian Coffee House are fast receding in the rear-view mirror. Coffee is here to stay.
