Chennai :

Time was when tea was the drink of the working class in the state and coffee was considered a sophisticated brew for the uppermiddle class and the elite. The introduction of coffee into Tamil Nadu caused a certain cultural anxiety initially but the beverage was ultimately appropriated by Tamil society.

These and other fascinating insights about the history of plantations, coffee and tea were revealed at a seminar titled ‘Tea For David’, a felicitation of historian and professor David Washbrook, who retired from Trinity College, Cambridge University after teaching at the famous institution for 40 years. This wasn’t surprising, because Washbrook is an academic who specialises in the history of south India.

“The appropriation of coffee was mediated both by caste and class and coffee became the marker of the brahmin middle-class,” said A R Venkatachalapathy, professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, speaking at the seminar organised by the department of humanities and social sciences of IIT-Madras

Quoting a court case from Kolar Gold Fields in which a Buddhist dalit was refused coffee, Venkatachalapathy explored the question of coffee and caste in colonial TN. “On July 13, 1927, Ramaswamy and two friends, one a brahmin, walked into a restaurant. He ordered three coffees. When the proprietor saw Ramaswamy, he told the waiter not to give coffee to a lower caste. Upset over the incident, he walked out. His brahmin friend, however, didn’t accept the coffee served to him as a mark of protest,” said Venkatachalapathy, the author of ‘In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History’.

“Ramaswamy filed a case and hired barrister E L Iyer, a renowned labour activist in Madras,” he said. “But today, there is no record of the proceedings, barring three reports in a Tamil newspaper. It shows that drinking coffee was no ordinary matter those days. With a separate place for Brahmins, caste was very much part of the ‘coffee hotels’ of those days, and leaders like Periyar E V Ramasamy had to fight against this.”

Speaking on ‘Planters, Power and the Colonial Law’, Ravi Raman, of Council for Social Development, New Delhi, said the British subjected dalits in plantations to various forms of institutional and coercive repression.

“The contrasting dimensions of colonial law have been explored by historians, but it appears that plantation owners too developed their own laws. They ultimately minimised abuse of workers but, by and large, they wielded coercive power,” he said.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Chennai / TNN / December 09th, 2014