Chronicle No. 63 · Places

College Street Coffee House: The Cooperative That Serves Argument

In Kolkata, an 1876 hall became a coffee house, then a workers' cooperative, then a song every Bengali knows by heart.

Albert Hall opened on College Street in April 1876. The Coffee Board put a coffee outlet inside it in 1942, and in 1947 the name was simplified to what everyone already called it: Coffee House.

Stand outside today and you are opposite Presidency University, a short walk from Sanskrit College and the University of Calcutta. That geography made the place.

In the mid-1950s the Coffee Board decided to shut its coffee houses down. The communist leader A. K. Gopalan urged the workers to take them over themselves. They did:

• The first workers' cooperative opened in Bangalore on 19 August 1957.
• Delhi followed on 27 December 1957.
• The network today runs to roughly 400 outlets, still cooperatively owned.

So the waiter in the white uniform and fan-shaped turban who sets down your coffee and cutlet is, in a real sense, an owner of the business.

What the room actually sells is not coffee. It is adda — the Bengali art of long, unhurried, argumentative conversation, bought for the price of one cup. Writers, film-makers, students and organisers have held those tables for decades; Sunil Gangopadhyay and Aparna Sen among them.

In 1983 the lyricist Gouri Prasanna Majumder, composer Suparna Kanti Ghosh and singer Manna Dey made a seven-minute song about seven friends who once met there and scattered across the world. None of the three had ever set foot in the place. It became one of the best-loved Bengali records ever made.

Slow tables, low margins, no one hurried out. A spreadsheet would call that a failure. Kolkata calls it an institution.

“Coffee Houser Shei Addata Aaj Aar Nei”

Lesson: The cheapest table in the house can be the one that makes your name; value is not always the same thing as tariff.