Indian Coffee House
A chain of coffeehouses run by workers’ co-operatives, remembered as a public room for conversation as much as a place to drink coffee.
Indian Coffee House is a network of coffeehouses that today is run by workers’ co-operative societies. Its beginnings are traced to 1936, when the Coffee Cess Committee opened a first outlet in Bombay. The Coffee Board describes itself as the Committee’s lineal successor, and some accounts credit the Board with running the coffee houses. By the 1940s there were reported to be nearly fifty outlets across British India.
The co-operative sector’s own accounts say that in the mid-1950s the Board decided to close the coffee houses and lay off the workers, and that the workers, encouraged by the trade-union leader A. K. Gopalan, campaigned to take them over. They formed co-operative societies, the first in Bangalore in 1957, and a federation of societies followed in 1960. Accounts differ on the timing of the closure, and one society’s history adds that Jawaharlal Nehru advised the workers to form co-operatives. The sources consulted do not give the Board’s side of the story.
The coffeehouse is the point of the story. The branch on College Street in Kolkata, which traces its roots to a hall founded in 1876, is the most widely known, and is associated with adda, the long, open-ended conversation of Bengali intellectual life. Stories of famous patrons are part of its lore, but in the sources consulted they are anecdotal.
Figures for the number of outlets vary between sources, and no single current count is given here.
- Type
- Coffeehouse network run by workers’ co-operatives
- Origin
- Bombay, 1936 (Coffee Cess Committee), by co-operative-sector accounts
- Co-operatives
- From 1957; federation of societies formed in 1960
- Most widely known room
- College Street, Kolkata
Editor’s Selection is an editorial choice by Sunjae Sharmah. Names and marks belong to their owners; no affiliation with, or endorsement by, the brand is implied.
Added October 2026