The story of Britain replacing tea with India's favorite drink...
Tea was not the first drink of the Indians
Tea , as it is now, was not the favorite drink of the Indians two centuries ago, but it was the coffee that arrived from the Middle East to the Mughal Empire, but British colonialism changed the habits of the Indians, and turned them to drink tea in the Indian continent . The " Middle East Eye
" website said in its report, which was translated by "Arabi 21", that the tea kiosks attract many Delhi people from all the suburbs of the city. Tea is undoubtedly the national drink of India. However, the drink's astounding popularity in the Indian subcontinent is less than two centuries old, emerging only as a result of the British rule in the region. But before the arrival of the British, coffee was the favorite drink of the Indians.
Mystics and merchants
The site stated that coffee was brought from the Horn of Africa to Yemen in the fifteenth century and then spread north to the Near East and then to Europe by the sixteenth century.
The drink spread east, and the Mughal elite in India considered it their favorite drink. While the Mughal Emperor Jahangir was fond of wine, the Hindu and Muslim nobles in his court were fond of drinking coffee.
In this context, Edward Terry, the chaplain of the English embassy at the court of Jahangir, stated that the court was fascinated by the properties of coffee, believing that it could "energize the spirits, aid digestion, and purify the blood".
The report noted that Arab and Turkish merchants who had strong trade relations with the Mughal Empire were the ones who brought coffee beans to the Indian subcontinent. And they didn't just bring coffee; They also brought other items, including silk, tobacco, cotton, spices, precious stones, and more, from the Middle East, Central Asia, Persia, and Turkey.
These goods reached the far corners of India, including the eastern region of Bengal. By the time Jahangir's son Shah Jahan (1628-1658) ascended the throne, interest in coffee had spread through society. Coffee was considered a health drink, an indicator of social mobility, and an integral part of the life of Delhi's social elite.
The site reported that the German adventurer Johann Albrecht de Mandelslo, who is like Terry; A contemporary European visitor, he wrote of his travels in the East through Persia and Indian cities, such as Surat, Ahmedabad, Agra and Lahore in a memoir titled "Travels and Travels in G. Albert de Mandelsloo".
In the year 1638, Mandelslo described coffee as a drink that helps to cope with heat and keep the body cool. In his book Travels in the Mughal Empire (1656-1668), François Bernier, a French physician, also refers to the large quantity of coffee imported from Turkey. In addition to its use in social circles and its supposed effects to ward off heat; The drink had religious purposes in the Indian subcontinent. Like their brothers in the Middle East and Central Asia; Sufis in India would drink coffee before practicing their all-night religious ritual known as the remembrance of God.
According to the site; Legend has it that the revered Sufi saint Baba Bodhan carried seven coffee beans in the folds of his robe on his way back from Mecca in the year 1670, and planted coffee seeds of Indian origin at a place called Chikmagalur. While this story may or may not be true; However, the Baba Budangiri mountain range and mountain range in the Indian state of Karnataka bear his name and remain an important center for coffee production, as well as a shrine dedicated to the Sufi saint.
consumption culture
Since the sixteenth century, India has become a host to a coffeehouse culture influenced by the culture emerging in Islamic empires in the West, particularly cities such as Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo and Istanbul.
In her article, "Secret Revealed: The Islamic History of Coffee," food historian Neha Virmani describes the coffee served at the Saraya Arabia, which was "famous for preparing sweet coffee." The saraya, which was commissioned by Hamida Banu, wife of Mughal emperor Humayun in 1560, still stands today as part of a UNESCO heritage site. Historians say that it was used as an inn by Arab religious scholars who accompanied the queen on her pilgrimage to Mecca, and that it was also used to house artisans from the Middle East who were working for the Mongols.
Historian Stephen Blake, in his 1991 work Shah Jahanabad: A Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639-1739, describes coffeehouses as gathering places for poets, storytellers, orators, and those "invigorated by spirit". Blake described how vibrant these coffeehouses were, an environment for organizing poetry recitals, storytelling and discussions, spending long hours playing board games, and how these activities affected the cultural life of the walled city.
The coffeehouses of Shahjahanabad, like the coffeehouses of Isfahan and Istanbul, accelerated the rise of a thriving consumer and food culture; There are snack vendors frequented by residents who offer snacks, nanois bread, bread and sweets specialized in the confectionery industry. This legacy is still felt in the Shahjahanabad area of Old Delhi to this day.
The man who swears by his coffee
The website stated that the provincial courts sought to replicate the atmosphere of Shahjahanabad and embraced the café culture on offer there. among him; Nobody loves coffee more than Alivardi Khan, the Nawab of Bengal, who was of Arab and Turkmen descent and ruled Bengal from 1740-1756. Coffee and food were the two greatest pleasures in his life. In the book Biography of the Latecomers in the History of India, written by one of the eminent historians of the time, Syed Ghulam Hussain Khan; A wonderful description has been given of Alivardi Khan's routine; A connoisseur of great food, intelligent conversation and fine Turkish coffee, he went to great lengths to source the best coffee beans, importing them from the Ottoman Empire and bringing them to Murshidabad, his capital.
Not only did Khan import his coffee beans, but his kitchen staff also came from places famous for their culinary excellence, such as Persia, Turkey and Central Asia. Khan personally hired his own coffee chefs, who brought their own coffee-making equipment with them. As a result, it is not possible to determine when the Mughal coffee culture disappeared from pre-colonial Bengal, but it is likely that it persisted until at least 1757.
Siraj ud-Daulah, Khan's grandson and successor, could not live up to his grandfather's legacy, and faced threats from the British, court culture quickly faded away, along with the fortunes of Bengal. When Bengal lost the decisive Battle of Plassey in 1757, the East India Company took control of the region, and coffee slowly disappeared from consumption and public consciousness.
The rise of tea cultivation
The site showed that the rise of the East India Company, which was the main agent of British control in India, marked the end of the dominant coffee culture in the Indian subcontinent. Britain's
fondness for tea emerged in the late seventeenth century, and China was its main supplier. As Lizzie Collingham writes in her book, Curry: A Tale of Chefs and Conquerors; That between 1811 and 1819 the value of Chinese tea imports amounted to "70,426,244 pounds sterling" out of the total "72,168,541" pounds the value of all imports from China, and indicated that Britain wanted to find an alternative source for tea.
India, with its fertile soil and favorable weather conditions, was the perfect place. In February of the year 1834; The then Governor-General William Bentick appointed a commission to look into the capabilities of India as a place to establish the East India Company's tea-producing unit. The indigenous Indian population was not only the laborers who cultivated and harvested the tea but also the consumers of the beverage.
The site concluded the report by saying that when tea cultivation dominated coffee production, Indians tended towards tea consumption. What added to the decline of Indian coffeehouse culture was the British ban on Indians visiting coffeehouses, which were forbidden to everyone except Europeans. Regardless of the British influence on the local culture, the Indian subcontinent was not immune to the global trends that the phenomenon of coffee drinking took.
Source : websites