Coffee and much more

The old ‘College Street Coffee House’ through the eyes of three regulars.

A lot, it is rightly said, can happen over a cup of coffee. The caffeine-fuelled addas of Indian Coffee House on Bankim Chatterjee Street in Kolkata have truly witnessed a lot over decades. From literary personalities like Sunil Gangopadhyay to actors Soumitra Chatterjee and Aparna Sen, the coffee house has been frequented by many celebrities since the 1940s when it was set up. Once the meeting place of Bengal’s intelligentsia, it might have lost some of its glory in terms of big names and fresh thoughts, but for the frequenters, College Street Coffee House, as it’s popularly called even though it’s on Bankim Chatterjee Street, retains its appeal.

“I have been coming here regularly for over 45 years barring those three years, from 1971 to 1973, when I was in jail for being part of CPI-ML,” says 61-year-old Alok Kumar Bhattacharya, a retired official of a pharmaceutical company. It was at the coffee house that young Bhattacharya, then a student of economics at Calcutta University, “fell in love” with the Communist ideology.

“In my university days, we had all the political discussions here, while Presidency College was our place of action where we used to write posters and handbills, and even make bombs,” recalls Bhattacharya sitting in the coffee house where, for the last time in 1993, he met Kanu Sanyal who had led the historic Naxalbari uprising.

Bhattacharya says that though he no longer finds the old known faces in the coffee house which is now dominated by young couples, the memories of the time spent here keep bringing him back.

For 61-year old Sachindra Nath Bhattacharya, this is the place he has grown up with — from being a student of Museology in Calcutta University to a professor in the same department. “This was sort of an extended classroom for us when I was a student in the 1970s. We used to have addas with our teachers and discuss academic problems,” recalls the professor. The coffee house is where his book, Shilpa Bastu Sanrakhan, was born. “I wrote most of its drafts sitting here,” he says. “And it was here that I met the late Sushil Bhadra who used to bring out a Bengali magazine called Jigyasa. Sushilda helped me a lot to write the book and get it published in 1983.”

Once a regular visitor, Bhattacharya now comes to the coffee house twice a week. His department on the Alipore campus is about 10 km away from College Street. “I come here just to sit and have a cup of coffee which costs Rs 10. It may sound stupid to some but I spend about Rs 100 to come here and then go back home.”

His colleague Chhanda Das says it was actually the economics of the coffee house which attracted the students. “When we were students, a cup of coffee cost 55 paise and potato chips cost two annas. The waiters did not mind if we shared. This is why it became our favourite place,” says 63-year-old Das, also a professor of museology.

For Das, the change in coffee house is not only in the lack of celebrity frequenters, but also in the absence of waiters like Ramu, Kesto and Basu. “Earlier, the waiters were more intimate with us. We didn’t even have to place an order; they knew what to serve,” she says. “But the one thing that hasn’t changed is that you can still sit here for hours with a cup of coffee and no one will ask you to leave, unless it is time to close down.”

On an average, the place caters to about 3,500 customers a day and earns around Rs 45,000, says Dipankar Dasgupta, the accountant and spokesman of Indian Coffee Workers’ Cooperative Society which runs the coffee house. But the staff too admits that the coffee house has lost its gravity to some extent and has somewhat turned into a “lovers’ point”.

Today, the coffee house is probably no longer the unofficial office of magazines such as Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Krittibas, but the noise, the thin wisps of cigarette smoke and the memories remain along with its popular identity.