Hardcover: 323 pages Publisher: Sang-e-Meel Publication Date: March 24, 2008 Language: English

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PK: Sang-e-meel Publications

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.

KK Aziz has done a great service to Lahore, Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent by documenting an era that will never return.

Raza Rumi (published in The Friday Times)

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (KK Aziz)
Khursheed Kamal Aziz (11 December 1927, Ballamabad, British India – 15 July 2009, Lahore, Pakistan) better known as K. K. Aziz, was a Pakistani historian, admired for his books written in the English Language. However, he also wrote Urdu prose and was a staunch believer in the importance of the Persian language

KK Aziz and the Coffee House of Lahore: Chris Moffat
During a recent trip to Lahore, I visited the Sang-e-Meel bookshop on Lower Mall Road in search of K.K. Aziz’s The Coffee House of Lahore. Happily, the store was well stocked with the late historian’s final work, and I spent the afternoon reading the text at a table outside the nearby Tollinton Market. 

Book Excerpt: Coffee House of Lahore by KK Aziz
the 1920s onwards, perhaps since event earlier, Lahore was the most highly cultured city of north India. From here appeared the largest number of Urdu literary journals, newspapers and books and two of the best English language dailies. The Mayo School of Arts was flourishing. The Young Men Christian Association was active and its premises and hall were used by all communities for literary and social activities.

Muhammad Hasan Latifi: The Coffee House of Lahore by KK Aziz
He was one of those remarkable men who arrived in Lahore in 1947 as a part of the flotsam & jetsam of the partition of the Punjab. His acute sufferings began with the ravages of the great migration & ended with his death 12 years later. The story of his life needs to be told in some detail.

Zaheer Kashmiri: The Coffee House of Lahore by KK Aziz
A flamboyant personality, consciously outrageous, bent upon having his say on the subject of his choice, and colourful in his deportment and dress. but all this served as an outer cover (perhaps a disguise) for a heart palpitating on the plight of the oppressed and a soul full of fellowship in sorrow… As an Urdu poet his reputation stands high. 

Arab Hotel Lahore: KK Aziz and A Hameed
No description of the cultural life of Lahore can be complete without mentioning the Arab Hotel. Once the old-fashioned baithaks (sitting rooms of the orient) had gone out f use, the literati wanted a pace where they could meet, eat and talk. For those ‘orientalists’ of the 1920s the Mall was too Westernized, distant and costly. By chance they started patronizing a small, unclean restaurant on Railway Road, opposite the gate of the Islamia College.

Dr. Abdus Salam: The Coffee House of Lahore By K K Aziz
Among my contemporaries and colleagues in Government College, companions in the Coffee House of Lahore and friends at these places and Elsewhere there is only one genius, and that was Abdus Salam. Salam was the son of Chaudhri Muhammad Husain, a schoolteacher of Jhang and Hajirah who belonged to Faizullah Chak near Batala Muhammad Husain was ajat and Hajirah a Kakkezai.