The Indian Coffee House Workers Movement, 1936–1977: From Colonial Firm to Workers Cooperative

Abstract

Nadakkal Parameswaran Pillai, a worker at the Indian Coffee House (ICH) in Trichur, later recalled that the cooperative found its place in history through its “martyrdom” at the hands of Sanjay Gandhi during India’s Emergency (1975–1977). Before the state demolished its Connaught Place location in 1976, that flagship café in New Delhi became the largest and most visible expression of workers’ confidence. From selling coffee on the street, they collectively acquired prime urban property and created a central meeting place for ministers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists, and political activists. That ICH emerged as a site of resistance during the Emergency appears puzzling given its origins as a colonial Coffee Board enterprise. Yet its transformation into a workers’ cooperative reshaped both its clientele and its political significance, turning it by the 1970s into a space of oppositional sociability. The cooperative form itself was unexpected. In the decades before 1957, when ICH formally became a workers’ cooperative, Communist Party of India (CPI) leaders and union organizers had pursued nationalization as part of a broader vision of socialist development. After prolonged agitation, however, the CPI accepted the organization of newly unemployed Coffee Board workers into a cooperative rather than a state-owned enterprise—an outcome that disappointed many rank-and-file activists. Drawing on archival materials, memoirs, and oral histories from multiple continents, this article reconstructs the history of the ICH workers’ movement from the 1930s through the Emergency, explaining why workers first occupied and appropriated a colonial institution and ultimately compromised with the Nehruvian state.