Books: K.K. Aziz’s The Coffee House of Lahore

Posted on November 6, 2010
Filed Under >Raza Rumi, Books, History, People
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Raza Rumi

(Editor’s Note: ATP  intends to present a series of posts with excerpts from this extraordinary book from K.K. Aziz. As a prelude to the series, we thought we should provide some context with a review of the book, The Coffee House of Lahore).

Before his death in July 2009, K.K. Aziz had accomplished one mission that he had set for himself, i.e. to write about the Lahore Coffee House, the glorious nursery of ideas. Luckily, despite his failing health, Aziz finished a draft that was meant to be a shining part of his autobiographical kaleidoscope.

“The Coffee House of Lahore: A Memoir, 1942-57” was published in 2008 and Aziz, in the opening chapters, tells us about the genesis of his passion to document this memorable phase of our contemporary history.

Whenever an intellectual, cultural and literary history of Lahore (or the Punjab and Pakistan) is written, the diverse circles which met and discoursed in the Coffee House will have to be described in detail and the ever-widening waves of their influence recorded. As nothing has been written so far on the subject and I don’t see anything in the offing, I give below a list of the important persons who I can recall.

Quite diligently, Aziz sets forth to list two hundred and six names that would include a wide array of thinkers, scholars, artists, writers and even some CSPs who obviously changed their life course despite the influence of their Coffee House days. For those who want to know about Lahore and its not-so-old diversity, K.K. Aziz’s memoir is a must-read. It is perhaps the only serious work on this important institution. Aziz has rightly mentioned in his book that the names he lists and the personae he describes in his biographical sketches aim to achieve four objectives.

First, that such a remembrance proves the ‘age of talent’ as it existed in Lahore. Second, a faithful picture of Lahore in the 1940s and 1950s emerges from the text. Third, that it provides the cultural historians of the future with a primary testament; and finally at a personal level, it shows how Aziz the historian and thinker was influenced by this exciting and vibrant milieu. During the early part of the 20th century, Lahore emerged as perhaps “the most highly cultured city of North India”, to quote Aziz. With a wide range of educational and cultural institutions and a composite society comprising all faiths and religions and political ideologies, the Lahore of today is no longer what it once was.

This eclectic mood of Lahore was best captured and represented by the Coffee House. As Aziz tells us, the Coffee House was “for over 30 years, the single most important and influential mental powerhouse which moulded the lives and minds of a whole generation, and its legacy affected the careers of the succeeding generation”.

It is odd that the tea-drinking British were to introduce coffee houses in India. Aziz takes us through the history of coffee-drinking as to how it inspired the world to switch to coffee as a beverage of intellectual invigoration. One aspect that he omits is that coffee drinking was popularised by the Sufis who found the drink conducive to their meditation and mystical elation. It is said that in the 1930s, the Government of India created a Coffee Board to promote the sale and consumption of coffee beans which were grown in South India, and hence a coffeehouse was established in every large city of the Indian subcontinent. Aziz comments that this was also the period of a resurgence of communism and the rise of the Progressive Writers’ Movement.

The British were tea-drinkers, so were the Russians and the Chinese. But the leftists chose to issue their exhortations over a cup of coffee. Even the otherwise cataclysmic partition of India in 1947 could not break this radicalism-coffee bond.

Thus in Lahore, the India Coffee House and India Tea House, situated 150 yards apart, became the two most popular meeting places of the literati and the radical intellectuals. Little wonder that Aziz states that the Coffee House of Lahore, “entertained more leftists than I found on the Communist Party office on McLeod Road”.

We find out from the book that before 1947, the leftist visitors of the Coffee House included luminaries such as Sajjad Zaheer, Syed Sibt-e-Hassan, Abdullah Malik, Safdar Mir, Zaheer Kashmiri and many others. The Coffee House changed many sites but remained at the Alfred building till the end. Its old site, off Mall Road, was later the location for Pak Tea House , which survived until the turn of the last century, before commercial imperatives became paramount and intellectualism had to be abandoned in favor of greed.

The best part of this book, of course, is plain writing that sketches the lives and personae of its regular habitués. For instance, my favorite, Safdar Mir, the towering intellectual of our times, finds a prominent place in the narrative. Aziz paints a rather intimate portrait:

Unafraid of authority and uneducated public opinion, he spoke his mind freely and persuasively. While a lecturer at the Government College, he had his head shaved and smiling down the frowns and boos of his 2nd-year students, continued to lecture calmly and suavely. He was the best-read journalist of his age, and I know no other man whose reach and understanding encompassed so many fields: English, Urdu and Punjabi literature, Marxism, politics, the way a society works and modern history. His hall-mark was a resounding laugh which could be heard three rooms away. His eyes glittered with merriment behind his thick lenses while narrating a funny story or narrating a point in his argument, as if throwing a challenge to his audience to produce a better one.

While browsing through the book, other eminent habitués of the Coffee House also came to life. Men of letters, such as Chiragh Hassan Hasrat, Zaheer Kashmiri, Aashiq Hussain Batalvi, Syed Abid Ali Abid (whose biographical sketch is candid and a wee bit un-sparing) are found walking on the streets of Lahore, sipping coffee at their favourite joint and indulging in the world of ideas and discourses.

The death of the Coffee House and the burial of Pak Tea House have coincided with the demise of discourse in Pakistan. We have done well to acquire nuclear weapons and thousands of madrassas that preach violence and hatred. But we have lost a culture that was based on tolerance, peace and amity.

Khursheed Kamal (K.K.) Aziz has done a great service to Lahore, Pakistan and the subcontinent by documenting an era that will never return.

Raza Rumi is serial blogger. This was first published at Jahane Rumi.

19 responses to “Books: K.K. Aziz’s The Coffee House of Lahore

  1. Watan Aziz says:

    In the interest of fairness to this discussion, I have not read the book. Nor has the author of this post presented enough excerpts from the book to cast any valid opinion.

    As usual, the commentary on the commentary on the commentary takes the conversation somewhere else. Perhaps a future through review or a more knowledgeable discussion will be more useful.

    But I do need to wrap this up.

    And history can be neatly wrapped up in and explained. That is why it can be presented in more than one ways.

    The discussions of Lahore coffee and tea houses failed to influence or produce the desired results of equity and justice in Pakistan, in WP and EP. And ‘W’ and ‘E’ are adjoining letters on the keyboard. Form into word ‘we’. But we were not ‘we’ then. We were us and them.

    And if we are going to talk about that era, of powerful and influential people, we cannot neatly set aside any references to EP. That would be skirting and shirking responsibility.

    Nostalgia of the past, unless balanced with the outcome, is skewed.

    And authors have a right to present the past as they see.

    On the other hand, readers and observers, should try to balance the past with outcome of the era. If the results were not good, then then question rises, what went wrong?

    That is only a responsible thing to do. Ask questions. Unless of course one is part of the ‘wah-wah’ club and drinks firehouse quantity of kool-aid!

  2. Gifts Pakistan says:

    Really nice article. Thanks for sharing this history.

  3. Quran Online says:

    Salam,well the coffee house contain many though provoking words and its a great bool

  4. Watan Aziz says:

    Well, the Internet has its ways. As much as I try, sometimes the point does not get across as well as I ever hope.

    In these coffee and tea houses, were the discussions and discourses. My comments are first hand recollections. Not some details handed down to me, cleaned up and or varnished in some books.

    True, as young as I was, I was indeed busy with my “namkeen” biscuits (I simply loved them). I do not nor cannot pretend to say I understood what was discussed. But I do know, I got the general theme right.

    Yes, there was a time when everyone knew everyone. And there were very few of these “everyones”. Now if you happened to know them, you would indeed have nostalgic feelings about it. It was a closed circle of known people.

    But times change.

    It is OK to invoke nostalgia. It has good feelings. But to I am not agreeable to the common mistake people thrown in and say, “that was the golden time, it will never come back”.

    I consider these kind of statements childlike.

    Yes, there was a time a rupee could buy a lot of stuff. But it was limited stuff. Yes, you could buy 10 yards of cloth, but the cloth was only in three colors and not well woven. The number of items, the quality, the variety and all permutations thereof, were limited. The rupee went far but not wide. (Well, rupee is not a good example in terms of currency, because we have thieves who have run it in ground, and that too is another story.)

    Yes, there was also a time, when there were a handful of medical specialists (pick your own specialty) in Lahore. Three phone calls, and you had reached all of them. And if anyone knew 2 of them, they knew 66% of the all the specialists. And if one of them was better than the other 2, well, you knew the best of the best. But now, if there are 20 or 30 of them, each one of them is not going to earn the same laurels as it was earlier.

    There was a time Pakistan used to pay foreign consultants for simple stuff. Now there is hardly a discipline you will find a Pakistani absent.

    Take the Internet for example. It’s introduction is totally indigenous and Pakistani in nature. It was young Pakistanis, many were students themselves; of MIT, Berkley, etc. that took the modem and bbs technology to Pakistan and as they say, the rest is history.

    And in those early days of the Internet and bbs chats and relays, everyone knew everyone or at least knew of them.

    So, should I say if those days were the golden era or today with broadband access in Pakistan? My answer is that it was simple then, it is wonderful now.

    So, to dis the present based on some limited factor of from the past misses the point.

    Yes, I did maintain, that the core values have the abilities of transference. However, now there is a visibility problem, not an illumination problem. None of this makes the today less than yesterday.

    Now as to pin the plight of the poor on these folks. I am not sure exactly how to respond to this. I remember Ramay and Mairaj Khalid before they joined PPP. No one was more socialist then those two. ZAB could not stand Ramay. But once in power, these two drifted away.

    So, I am not sure, if their ideals were the real deal before power or did the whiff power reach their corruption zones too.

    But I will assure you, in these halls, the contempt for our Bengali brothers and sisters was not any lesser. As a matter of fact, very few faces at the tables were Bengalis. Unless of course, they were working for the tables as waiters in Shezan. The “Butcher of Dhaka” was not a mad man. He had active and real support in WP. It is this that I lament about.

    Now, I love Lahore and everything of Lahore is pure pride and joy.

    But I love Pakistan more. I have come to a personal understanding that I am not interested in a Lahore prosperous at the expense of Pakistan. There needs to be a balance.

    And therefore, looking back in history, I am not sure if all of these guys did all they could or should have done. Exceptions noted.

    But here again, let me add, there is always a one-to-one reality. And there is group mentality. Most people in the world are good on a one-to-one basis. Put them in a group and the group thinking takes over. (This is why, at this site, most people vote the same way. They all read the same stuff, they ‘eat’ the same stuff, and it is no wonder, they drink the same koolaide.)

    So, this is a little complicated to simplify.

    And I am still not sure if I have made any sense. But this was a slow evening and verbosity on a slow evening is fun!

  5. Fawad says:

    Raza, thanks for writing about K.K Aziz and this book. The neglect of Aziz’s life and work tell you most of what you need to know of the steady deterioration and by now abysmal state of a rational and historical discourse in Pakistan.

    The most poignant phrase in your review is the last. Indeed that era is not likely to return. Watan Aziz in his comment unfortunately misses the point. We never return to the past but a living social and intellectual milieu keeps hope alive for the future. There were people amongst those intellectuals, who despite personal foibles, knew something of the world and how to engage with it. There was still a sense of possibility. Many of them were of middle class and modest means, intellectually and politically engaged so pinning the plight of commoners on them is laughable. Among them were the likes of Habib Jalib who never could get along with anyone in power.

    I could go on about K.K Aziz. I don’t have a copy of this reviewed book but I brought back from Pakistan the first volume of his autobiography (1927-1948) earlier this year. Reading it paints an incredibly rich portrait of an upwardly mobile British educated Punjabi Muslim family. It was the first half of the twentieth century when the Muslim investments in British education that had started with Aligarh and progressed in Lahore began to pay off in significant numbers with the creation of an intellectual and literary class of which KK Aziz was a part (this included N.M. Rashid, Faiz, Meeraji, Manto, Hafiz Mehmood Sheerani, Abdul Majeed Salik, Maulana Salahuddin Ahmed, Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Aashiq Btatalvi, Patras and many others). With steadily deteriorating standards after partition it took the new country of feudal and military plutocrats less than 40 years to snuff out the last vestiges of intellectualism from the heart of Punjab. It is the tragic story of the trajectory that the new country took that today no one can name a single homegrown intellectual heavyweight born post-partition who can be mentioned in the same sentence as K.K. Aziz.

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