Germans stir coffee culture - University that studied Vedas researches city landmark G.S.

MUDUR Goettingen (Germany), June 28: In this university town where scholars began studying the Panchatantra and the Vedas nearly 180 years ago, Bhaswati Bhattacharya is now exploring how the Indian Coffee House in Calcutta may have shaped the citys social and cultural history. Bhattacharya is studying archives and memoirs, and seeking out Indian Coffee House: long-time visitors to the coffee house on Calcuttas College Street in Somethings brewing what she says is the first formal effort ever to probe the institution through the lens of social history. The research on coffee consumption in urban public spaces is among projects just launched at the new Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at the University of Goettingen in Germanys state of Lower Saxony, which is also home to the headquarters of Volkswagen. The university, where Indology traditions go back to the 1830s, has turned its focus on myriad facets of modern India the persistence of caste and religious divides, changes in society and dietary patterns, and social change stirred by the growth of automotive traffic. In the changing cycles of academic interest, there is a reemergence of interest in India, said Ravi Ahuja, a 50-year-old Ger man-born historian and director of CeMIS, partly-funded by the German Academic Exchange Service, an agency representing in stitutions of higher education across Germany. As India emerges a core market for European products, Ahuja said, economic in terests may also be driving moves to understand Indian society better. Bhattacharya, a research fellow at CeMIS, says her coffee consumption project goes beyond previous historical work on coffee and tea consumption which tended to focus exclusively on issues such as plantation labour and exploitation of resources by colo nial powers. Were trying to understand how cities developed, what urban places attracted citizens, what space did such places occupy in the life of the city and the dwellers, who are the people who visited the Indian Coffee House, and why? Bhattacharya told The Tele graph. We need to probe such questions to understand a culture, said Bhattacharya, who visited the Indian Coffee House in Calcutta for research early this year and plans to visit coffee houses in Delhi, Bangalore, and Thiruvananthapuram in a latter part of her

project. In pursuit of analytical material, Bhattacharya has also talked to visitors who have been regulars at the coffee house for decades Anathbandu De, a retired college teacher, among them, has been visiting the coffee house since the late 1950s, while Dhruba Badhuri, 70, who was only a teenager when he first visited College Street coffee house and became a regular visitor, but now visits the Jadavpur coffee house. Director Ahuja himself is putting together a project with the neighbouring Max Planck Institute of the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity that will aim to use documentary films to study changes in urban life including persisting caste and religious divides and inequality. Indian experiences of living with diversity or failing to do so are certainly relevant to Europe, Ahuja told The Telegraph. Caste does not seem to be getting less important in the process of social transformation but is preserved and adapted to conditions in changing society. Studies on Indias diversity may be of particular interest to Germany where the existence of a strong mainly Turkish Muslim community raises questions similar to those in India, Ahuja said. India is a vast social laboratory as well as one of the worlds most dyanamic societies. Other scholars at CeMIS, which was inaugurated last November, are also trying to document that dynamism in their own ways Florian Hollen, a doctoral student is studying land acquisition, another researcher Stephan Tetzlaff is studying changes brought by automobiles in rural north India, Sebastian Schweke has just published a monograph on the Bharatiya Janata Party. And anthropologist Henrike Donner plans to investigate how globalisation is changing social customs and diets in small cities. - Grants from the German Academic Exchange Service also facilitate exchange of scholars between India and Germany. Jawa harlal Nehru University historian Indivar Kamtekar is currently teaching courses here on colonial and post-colonial statehood. Devika Sethi, a JNU doctoral student is here for three months to study censorship in postindependent India, accessing texts she could not procure back home. Sethi said home department files for the post-1947 period have not been transferred to the national archives of India. A histori an of modern India has, ironically, much easier access to the colonial records than for the period post-independence, she said. Students pursuing Masters degrees or research at CeMIS will visit India during September this year to study Indias economy and the informal sector, and a second tour planned for 2012 will

focus on industrial restructuring and urban development. Goettingen may still pride itself for the translations of Sanskrit works by its first resident Indologist Theodor Benfey during the mid-1800s but for the current generation of scholars here, India lures with socio-economic issues that have spilt into the 21st century.