Kauphy By Any Other Name is Kaapi

It took less than a century for coffee to become a South indian ‘Tradition’! Here’s how it happened.

Setting the Mood

As you read this, no matter when you read this, I am sipping a tumbler of hot filter coffee in the morning.

Yes, it is morning and I am sipping coffee, whenever you read this.

Just to rub it in, I am drinking the most authentic south Indian filter coffee (here it’s just called filter coffee, since I’m already in South India).

And you’re not.

Once, Coffee Was a ‘Useless’ Crop Grown Across India

Coffee (like indigo, poppy and tea) was another completely useless crop that was cultivated for export by the (British) Government of India since the mid 1800s.

At that time, the typical South Indian household didn’t have a ‘morning drink’. In the extremely large Madras state, brunch was usually the previous day’s rice steeped in water and allowed to ferment slightly. It was eaten/drunk/slurped mixed in buttermilk, with two green chilies for company. It is indubitably the probiotic boss of foodstuffs.

Yakult can kiss rice gruel’s bubbly posterior.

Eventually, You Drink What You Sow (Even if it Wasn’t Meant For You)

People were generally healthy and hardy and didn’t really have time to indulge in food, what with all the colonisation and taxation and all that.

And then the Great Depression hit the West. And the people there didn’t really have time to indulge in food anymore. Or drink. Especially coffee. Who wants to WAKE UP to a horrible day of penury anyway.

And that’s when the Government of India (British), at the ardent request of the folks back home, decided to bail out the rest of the empire. The Coffee Cess Act (1935) was passed in 1935. Research and propaganda began to promote coffee consumption in India.

Coffee for Everyone! After a Little Tax

In the late 1980s Maggi’s sales reps would give out free samples of the yellow wormy looking thing to all and sundry. It eventually caught on and how! Turns out this idea has its colonial roots in Indian coffee. Free coffee samples were given to every household across South India and the media was rife with talks about its health benefits.

Coffee could only be ‘imported’ to India through proper licences and was supposedly the drink of the ‘Dorai’ (white man) and all those who aspire to become Dorais.

Coffee houses were set up across the country.

(Here’s a beautiful ode to them, by The Quint’s Pallavi Prasad.)

We Grew It. But Still Didn’t (Bite) Buy It (he he he)

Even before the campaigning could catch on, the Second World War began and in the words of one of my old acquaintances in the Ooty coffee estates, ‘things went ‘thuppp!’

For almost a decade, from 1940 to a little after Independence, Indian growers were required to give 60 percent to the export pool (free, basically) and HAD to sell the remaining 40 percent in India.

South Indians still didn’t buy it. They saw nothing in coffee (not even the magically magical chicory root) that made it better than the humble rice gruel.

And then Narasu’s took over.

Narasu’s and The Big Fat Idea

Established in 1926, Narasu’s (named after VL Narasu, the founder) wanted to become a household name in coffee, based on high principles of ethics, quality, reliability, fair dealing and integrity. (he he he).

Anyway, the logo of the English Lady in a bob-cut, drinking coffee like one would sip tea, didn’t really work. And then they struck gold with a marketing idea.

Yup. Surf wasn’t the first to make the home-maker the primary TG.

Sales boomed. Coffee, filter coffee became the first official, traditional morning drink. Narasu’s continued it’s campaign for decades to come, with great success.

Rice Gruel Gone With the Wind

This was in the late 40s. Since the Brits liked their coffee with a spot of warm milk (cafe latte, anyone?), so did we. And in less than a year, filter coffee was FIRMLY established in Tamil households.

Today, fermented rice is occasionally prescribed by doctors with a slight affinity to pre-independence eating habits. It is considered poor man’s fare in cities. In smaller towns, it is an option only in abject penury, when even tea (bleaarrgh!) is out of the question.

Filter Kaapi, Then and Now

Then: The husband would recline in his teak wood easy chair and the wife would place a huge tumbler of coffee and another tumbler of water next to it. The husband would dip his finger in the coffee. If it made him go ‘Ayyo!’, he would add some water to the coffee. Dip finger again.
<If> no Ayyo
<Then> drink
<else> repeat

Now: South Indian Filter Kaapi beats cafe latte in the global scene. And Melitta Bentz, the German housewife and inventor of the coffee filter would arguably be displeased by the fact that the biggest users of her invention don’t really know her.

(Vikram Venkateswaran is a freelance writer, TV producer and media consultant. Headings, titles and captions are his kryptonite. He just moved to Chennai and hopes the city likes him and is nice to him.)