Most Pakistanis assume coffee is a western beverage and tea is Pakistani. In fact, the opposite is true. Coffee was introduced by Arab Muslims and tea was introduced to South Asia by the British.

The story about the discovery of coffee goes that a young Ethiopian herder called Kaldi noticed his herd was acting frisky after eating berries from a bush in the Kaffa (southwestern Ethiopia) region. Others claim coffee was discovered in Yemen. It soon became associated with Sufis who drank coffee to stay awake during the long hours of dhikr (ritual prayer).

James Grierson’s The History of Coffee claims the first coffee houses were established in Makkah in public places where Muslims could socialise and discuss religious matters. As Islam spread, so did the love of coffee — to Turkey, Syria and Egypt and across the Mediterranean. Legend has it that a pilgrim, Baba Budan, smuggled coffee beans out of Makkah to his home in Mysore, where he successfully cultivated coffee plants.

In the 17th century, the Dutch smuggled a coffee plant out of Mocha in Yemen. Soon colonisers commercialised coffee cultivation and the beverage became popular all across Europe and then the Americas.

The story of tea goes that, around 2,700 BC, the Chinese Emperor Shennong was sipping a bowl of boiled water. The breeze dropped in a few leaves from a nearby tree and he loved the refreshing taste. It came to be known as tê in Min Chinese and chá in Mandarin. Tea travelled down the Silk Route and soon chai khanas (tea houses) sprang up everywhere. Once again, it was the colonisers that established extensive tea plantations, with India becoming the largest tea producer.

The English added milk and sugar to black tea or khave. An elite beverage, it wasn’t till the 1930s when William McKercher developed a machine to crush, tear and curl tea leaves, that it became affordable for the masses. The India Tea Board initiated an aggressive advertising campaign to popularise tea. Surprisingly, it wasn’t till the 1950s that tea really became the favourite beverage for South Asians.

However, the real revolution was the establishment of coffee houses and tea rooms. Unlike the ale houses whose alcoholic drinks were depressants, coffee and tea were stimulants that sharpened the mind. The social mix of clientele, generated an authentic exchange of ideas. The coffeehouse played a crucial role in the birth of the Age of Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions and the Anti-War Movement of the 1960s.

The call to storm the Bastille started at Paris’s Café de Foy. Isaac Newton dissected a dolphin, Darwin developed his theories of evolution, and the New York Bank and Stock Exchange were planned in coffee houses. Lloyd’s of London, in fact, started out as a coffee house. Café de Flore was the meeting place for writers and artists in Paris. The coffee houses of Oxford were called penny universities — the cost of a coffee.

Karachi’s Zelin’s Coffee House, Pioneer Coffee House, Café Parisian and others had their own literary clientele. Lahore’s Pak Tea House, founded by Boota Singh in 1940 as The India Tea House, was the birthplace of the Progressive Writers’ Association, frequented by the literary giants of Pakistan.

The open discussions at coffee houses alarmed those in power. England’s Charles II, and the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV tried unsuccessfully to shut them down. Spies mingled with the clientele to gather intelligence, but the charm of café life flourished from Tangier to Karachi.

The Irani tea shops of Karachi, Bombay and Hyderabad Deccan, first established by Iranian Parsis and Muslims escaping the drought in Khairabad and Yazd in the 19th century, became the haunt of journalists, businessmen and students.

While dhabas [roadside eateries], that began as a stop for transporters, have taken over the tea drinking culture, they all display prominent signs prohibiting political talk. The most exciting Pakistani tea news became its endorsement by Indian air force pilot Abhinandan Varthaman, captured by Pakistani forces in 2019.

The demise of café culture may have begun with commercial franchises like Starbucks, but was sealed by the arrival of social media, the new “meeting place.” One can speculate that the intelligentsia became atomised and lost their link with the street. The world lost the dynamic, creative energy generated by café culture.

Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist. She may be reached at durriyakazi1918@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 12th, 2021