From the outside, the Indian Coffee House of Kolkata is nothing more than a rickety board squeezed in between two book stalls. Blink and you might miss the narrow lane that leads to the entrance. It’s only when you make your way through the dark alley and into the giant, loud space that is Kolkata’s Coffee house that you realize it: hidden inside lanes and lanes of bookstores and eateries, a piece of Kolkata’s history is still kept alive in this 300-year old coffee house.
With its high ceilings, small tables set together and loads of sunlight coming in through the high-set windows, the Coffee House immediately takes you back in time. It hasn’t changed much since pre-independence days, when the place was a water hole for the students of the Presidency College and the Calcutta University. The Coffee house consists of two floors: the ground floor and the first floor. The first floor is simple a veranda that overlooks the ground floor with corridors running across the four walls of the coffee house. With thirty-odd tables on the ground floor and nearly as many on the veranda, the place is constantly abuzz. Laughter, conversation and arguments bounce off the wall – there is never a silent moment at the Coffee House.
Back in the day, when the Coffee House was still called Alberta Hall, it was a hub for the city’s well-known intellectuals and litterateurs. The stories always paint a romantic picture: the writers and poets of the city sprawled out over a table, twirling a cigarette in one hand and nursing a cup of tea with another. Debates, poetry, discussions: the coffee house has seen it all. The likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Subhash Chandra Bose, Satyajit Ray, Amartya Sen and Manna Dey frequented the Coffee House, making it a breeding ground for the inception of many political and cultural movements of the country. The charm of the coffee house lied in the conversations that flowed and the ideas that were exchanged – and many of the café’s patrons reminisce about it to this day.
Chanchal Kumar Mukherjee, an 84-year old resident of Golf Green, Kolkata talks about the coffee house fondly. “There are two floors in coffee house – the ground floor and the balcony,” he says. “We used to joke that the ground floor was the ‘House of Commons’, and the upper verandah was the ‘House of Lords’. We’d watch couples flitting about in the ‘House of Lords’, young boys trying to woo their lady-friends,” he chuckles. Kochi Dadu – as I lovingly call him – still calls the coffee house Alberta Hall, and has many stories to tell. “There is a very interesting thing about the place,” he tells me. “The people on every table are always chattering very loudly – every single table, loud as can be. And yet – if you try, you can never make out what the next table is talking about.” Kochi Dadu is excited, I can tell. “It always baffled me! However hard you try, you can never eavesdrop on another conversation in the coffee house.”
Over the years, Kolkata’s go-to spot for adda has collected a few layers of dust. As Kochi Dadu points out, there is something about the atmosphere of the Coffee House that remains missing. While the patrons of the café used to order rounds and rounds of tea and steaming hot pakodas back in the day, now they often have to choose between items of a new menu that boasts of chowmein and sandwiches. Dadu’s favourite food item on the menu, the chicken omelette, is served no more at the café, much to his dismay. It still remains crowded – you always have to wait a few minutes to get a table at the coffee house – but there is something amiss about the soul of the café. Kochi Dadu is reminded of Manna Dey’s song Coffee Houser Shei Addata Aaj Aar Nei, which sings of the good old times at coffee house that are no more.
The years have brought their own share of changes to the coffee house, but not at the cost of Kolkata’s age-old tradition of adda. Heartfelt conversations about everything in the world – politics, religion, food, family – still find a home here. No matter how many years it has been, stories of the coffee house always strike a chord with Kolkata. It is these memories that string together the city’s history of revolutionary ideas, the freedom of a conversation and the love for a simple cup of tea and pakodas.
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