Professor Kristin Plys’s latest article, “The Indian Coffee House Workers Movement, 1936–1977: From Colonial Firm to Workers’ Cooperative,” was recently published in International Labor and Working-Class History. The article traces the unlikely political afterlife of the Indian Coffee House (ICH), an institution that began as a colonial enterprise of the Coffee Board of India but became, by the 1970s, a vital space of oppositional sociability during The Emergency.
At first glance, the coffee house’s prominence as a site of resistance appears puzzling. Established under colonial auspices to promote coffee consumption, it seemed an unlikely incubator for dissent. Yet its transformation into a workers’ cooperative fundamentally reshaped both its clientele and its political meaning. By the time of the Emergency, the Coffee House had become synonymous with debate, organizing, and left intellectual life. Its cooperative structure anchored a new relationship between labor, public space, and politics.
The article reconstructs the long history behind this transformation. In the decades prior to 1957, when the ICH formally became a cooperative, leaders of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and affiliated union organizers had demanded nationalization in line with a broader socialist vision of postcolonial development. After prolonged agitation and the closure of Coffee Board outlets, however, the CPI ultimately accepted the reorganization of newly unemployed workers into a cooperative rather than a state-owned enterprise—an outcome that disappointed many rank-and-file activists who saw it as a compromise with the Nehruvian state.
Drawing on archival research, memoirs, and oral histories conducted across multiple continents, the article follows the ICH workers’ movement from the 1930s through the Emergency. It explains how workers first occupied and appropriated a colonial institution and why, in the end, they embraced the cooperative form and reshaped the terrain of labor politics in postcolonial India.