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K. A. Ananthram
No one knows how coffee really came
to India. Legend has it that, back in the 17th
century, Baba Budan, a pilgrim travelling to the holy places
of Islam, brought back seven coffee seeds from Yemen. These
seeds were planted in the hills of Chandragiri, situated in
today’s Chikmagalur district of Karnataka.
Baba Budan, whose name adorns the hills
where the first seeds were planted, is credited with transplanting
the migrant bean from its distant native land to a foreign
country, where it spawned a flourishing enterprise that has
provided the means of livelihood to several farmers centuries
later.
For more than a century after its introduction, coffee was
rated low in India, restricted in cultivation and consumption
to the Malnad farmers who grew the crop for subsistence and
personal consumption. History credits the burst of coffee
beyond the hills of Chandragiri to a Britisher.
The famed trading company, Parry and
Company, operating out of the erstwhile Madras State, had
an enterprising manager by the name of J. H. Jolly. It was
he who petitioned the Mysore kingdom for a lease of 40 acres
of agricultural land to cultivate and export the crop. The
petitioner was duly obliged and it proved to be the turning
point for coffee in India.
Early on during his Indian sojourn,
Jolly realised the commercial potential of coffee as the bean’s
use spread from Arabia to Asia Minor to Europe in the span
of a few centuries. Despite the rabid opposition to coffee
in some countries (it was termed as Satan’s drink in
some places), it slowly gained popularity and came to be consumed
in increasing quantities across the world.
Typical of the colonial traders of
his day, Jolly seized the opportunity and took the lease of
the 40 acres of land from the Mysore kingdom to rewrite the
history of coffee cultivation in India.
The commercial exploitation of the drink made more and more
enterprising and pioneering planters take to the cultivation
of coffee. Over the years small holdings coalesced into larger
ones that created bigger coffee estates, almost all of them
situated in the Coorg district of Karnataka.
Given that coffee was a variable berry crop by nature and
that its markets were volatile, only the courageous and resourceful
survived to reap the benefits of the continuing growth of
coffee as a crop in India. As the coffee landscape changed,
dominated, of course, by the British, the planter community
saw the emergence of a host of related services that straddled
the entire spectrum of activities in the industry.
These included coastal agents who arranged
services leading up to the shipment of coffee; managing agents
who set up coffee-curing works; transport agents who ensured
the transportation of the bean as a bulk commodity and guaranteed
its safety en-route; and agents who organised the manpower
for this labour-intensive industry.
The industry was cruising along without
many problems till 1930, when the winds of the global economic
depression derailed it. For this first time an industry which
had always forged ahead on its own approached the government
for succor. This led to the setting up of the Coffee Cess
Committee, which funded activities to promote coffee consumption
in the country. The body, which later metamorphosed into the
Coffee Board of India, was set up in 1936 and was to alter
India’s coffee landscape for many decades.
The Coffee Board, with plenty of assistance from Ivor Bull,
a general manager of a British plantation Consolidated Coffee,
steered the fortunes of the coffee industry through its most
trying times. With the world war cutting off all export routes
for Indian coffee, the Coffee Board transformed itself into
a marketing outfit. Planters would sell their produce to the
Board, which took on the responsibility of marketing it.
Little were the planters to realise
that this temporary arrangement of selling their produce to
the Coffee Board would be institutionalised by the government
in 1952, when the Coffee Amendment Bill passed by Parliament
made it mandatory for all planters to compulsorily sell their
produce to the Board.
This monopolistic
state of affairs continued for till the early 1960s, when
the winds of liberalisation, aided by a lot of effort from
Tata Coffee, prised open the doors of the Coffee Board and
a lot of controls were loosened. This new chapter in the industry’s
story has breathed new life into many plantations, allowing
larger outfits like Tata Coffee to dream big and make their
mark through brands in the global coffee market.
brewing
a strong brand | coffee
in india
| all
the tasty moves |
leading
the industry
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