By Anwar Syed

Dawn March 13, 2007.

I READ history, but it is not often that I think of my own past. The other day I went to see Professor K.K. Aziz, a friend since we were kids in high school. We reminisced a bit and, among other things, we talked about the Lahore Coffee House where we met almost every evening between 1948 and 1952.

I have been thinking of writing a short recollection of this experience, and now is probably as good a time to do it as any. Having grown up in the villages of Punjab (most of them now on the Indian side), I was a lot more used to drinking milk than the beverages to which the city folks were accustomed. My family and I stayed with this custom for the most part even when we moved to towns, even though we did have tea on special occasions, especially when guests arrived, whom it was deemed important to impress with our “modernization”. When I was at college in Lahore, friends and I got to drinking tea more often, usually at the college canteen (“tuck shop”).

Once in a while we had the adventure of going to a restaurant for a “cuppa.” I had read in novels that back in their own country the English consumed enormous amounts of the brew, and any time of day could be tea time. During my years in college I learned that tea drinking had as much become a part of the Indian urban culture. Coffee was beginning to surface about this time, but in my experience it was still a few years away.

Large coffee plantations developed in some of Inda’s southern provinces in the late 1920s and 1930s, and an India Coffee Board was establish to popularise and market the product in the country’s eastern and northern urban centres. It set up and managed coffee houses in the larger cities, one of the earliest of them in Lahore, which opened for business in 1941, first in the YMCA building and then in a facility in a block of restaurants and stores across from the Commercial Building on The Mall, next to the Cheney’s Lunch Home and a few hundred feet away from the Pak Tea House, an alternative place where professionals and the more intellectually inclined persons gathered.

Lawyers, journalists, poets, writers, artists, professors, advanced university students, and occasionally even some politicians, visited the Lahore Coffee House. Khushwant Singh, the celebrated Indian journalist and historian, who frequented this establishment before independence (then called the India Coffee House) and later the one in Delhi, recalls that “everyone who was anyone or expected to be somebody” came here. I have heard that some of the celebrities among lawyers and writers — Manzur Qadir, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, Charagh Hasan Hasrat, Hamid Nizami, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ijaz Batalvi, Abdullah Malik — visited. That was before my time, but I remember that Khurshid Ahmad Khan (a distinguished lawyer and later law minister in Ayub Khan’s government), Nasir Kazmi and Habib Jalib (both of whom were already getting to be famous) came.

Men with different interests, belonging to a variety of professions and age groups, could be found in the same place. They did not always sit exclusively with their cohorts. An older statistician might be seen sharing a table with a young poet and the two of them chatting. Gaps were thus bridged and an inclusive cosmopolitan environment created.

The Coffee House in Lahore was essentially a “men’s club”. It was rare for a couple, a single woman, or a group of women to come in, sit down, sip coffee and chat away. Apparently, it was not the same way in post-independence coffee houses in India. I have read that women came to the one in Delhi and spent the time of day without any of the male patrons raising an eyebrow. In any case, that was then and now is now. It seems that things are changing in Pakistan also. During my current visit I have eaten at the Gymkhana and other clubs in Lahore and Islamabad and seen a great many women, unaccompanied by male relatives, coming in.

It should be emphasised that the Lahore Coffee House, like those elsewhere in the subcontinent, was pre-eminently a meeting place, not an eating place. If food was what one wanted, one went to an eatery. Folks came to the Coffee House to meet friends and others with whom they expected to enjoy talking. They did drink coffee while they were there, but that was incidental to their main interest, which was conversation. There was never a pre-planned agenda for a typical meeting.

Subjects came up at random, and everything under the sun from politics to literary criticism, from the price of tea in China to Marx’s theory of surplus value, could be discussed. It was much like the pubs in England. Big persons engaged in small talk (and at times small people talked big). Recall Dr Samuel Johnson, the great English linguist, and his friend, James Boswell, in 18th century London, nibbling on a leg of lamb and drinking ale (both of them overweight as a result of excessive indulgence) in their favourite tavern and exchanging “thoughts” on the contours of their barmaid’s figure.

Radicals and ideologues in the Coffee House were especially vibrant and vocal, and much of their talk was meant to denounce the current establishment and the status quo. But most people came to chat, not to debate and settle serious issues. In fact, a conclusion that all might accept was neither expected nor even desired. It was preferable to leave matters unfinished so that the participants might, at their next meeting, pick up the thread where they had left it last time.

The Coffee House was a relatively inexpensive place. Moreover, its managers understood that their patrons came to converse with one another more than to drink coffee and eat chicken sandwiches. It seems to me that they were even approving of their patron’s priorities. A bunch of persons might occupy a table, order coffee, and sit there for an hour or more without ordering anything else, and the waiters would not ask them to make room for other customers or hassle them in other ways.

As I said earlier, a few of my friends and I met at the Lahore Coffee House every evening (approximately 6:00 to 8:30 p.m.) for some four years.

These friends included K.K. Aziz, Waheed-uz-Zaman, Shaukat Ali, Saeed Osman Malik, and Chaudhry Anwar Aziz. At this point, allow me to say that with the exception of Chaudhry Sahib, who later chose to practise the “noble” craft of politics, all of us went to distinguished British or American universities, earned doctoral degrees, wrote books and other scholarly work, eventually became professors and stayed with a life of the mind. As far as I know, none of us ever had a day of regret about the career we had chosen.

What did we talk about? I imagine we discussed politics but I don’t now remember the specifics of how and where each one of us stood. That like much of the crowd in the place we were dissatisfied with the contemporary state of affairs might be taken for granted. We talked about the erudition or otherwise of the professors who taught us at the university, their classroom styles and skills, biases, and idiosyncrasies. We didn’t talk much about religion, but we did discuss issues in political philosophy and ethics. We recited and discussed some of the poetry being written at the time, notably that of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Abdul Hamid Adam, Syed Abid Ali, M.D. Taseer, Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum, and Saifudddin Saif among others. We also liked Nasir Kazmi and Habib Jalib, whom we invited to our table whenever we could entice them away from their other admirers.

There was conversation but never noise at our table. We had learned the civil art of listening to one another. We argued back and forth, and our discussions might at times be serious and vigorous, but they were never vehement. None of us ever lost his cool and shouted at another. These discussions gave each of us, I suppose in varying degrees, a questioning and analytical frame of mind, inclination to ask for evidence in support of propositions being asserted, and the ability to discern whether the conclusions being announced did indeed follow from the given premises, and whether the premises themselves were plausible.

I have no doubt that these conversations contributed to my own intellectual development more than any formal educational experience I had in my formative years in Pakistan. It also gave me abiding friendships that have been God’s gift to me ever since.

The Lahore Coffee House closed its doors many years ago and houses of its kind in India have reportedly fallen on evil days. Disappearance of the interaction and possibly fusion of various streams of thought and professions they provided is surely a loss. There may be several reasons why the successors to the intellectuals of yesteryear do not go to the Coffee House any more. Television, videos, cell phones and the e-mail exchanges one can have and the games one can play on the computer screen have isolated persons from one another. Allied to this development is the fact that the art of conversation has declined in our own as well as the western world.

In a book entitled Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller writes that conversation is not about striking a deal or agreeing on a strategy to achieve certain goals. Nor is it an intersection of monologues. It is, as the British philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, had once noted, an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. Real conversation is not guided by a desire to impress others or establish one’s superiority. It is a good-natured exchange between civilised people. Flatterers, no less than bigots, are its enemies.

The writer is a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics for the spring semester.
E-mail: anwarhs@lahoreschool.edu.pk