A social history of the consumption of coffee in India, 19th-20th centuryNew proposed title:Drink it The Damn Way We Want: The Politics of the Consumption of Coffee in India since the 19th century

这项研究将探讨咖啡作为一种商品的轨迹及其在印度国内市场的消费，这是一个迄今为止尚未系统分析的主题。很少有人知道，咖啡在印度的历史比茶更悠久。然而，虽然茶是后来者，但它被认为是国民饮料。目前的项目旨在描绘自19世纪30年代印度大规模生产咖啡以来咖啡消费的长期历史，以了解咖啡在热饮等级中的地位，如果社会对咖啡的态度发生变化，咖啡的消费者是谁，并分析消费政治的意义上是什么指导选择一种特定的饮料。指导这项研究的假设是，作为一种赚取外汇的产品，咖啡历来是出口市场的产品，国内市场在1929年大萧条之后首次得到系统的解决。在第二次世界大战后的时代，当新市场向印度咖啡开放时，国内市场再次退居幕后，直到跨国公司经营的咖啡连锁店进入印度市场。印度咖啡市场的一个特点是，就像20世纪30年代和90年代一样，咖啡行业也面向受过教育的英国化中产阶级。现在，当印度被说成是咖啡文化的时候，重点仍然是在公共场所消费这种商品。该项目将研究咖啡业的正式记录和咖啡种植园主在殖民和后殖民时期制作的记录、媒体的商业广告和用区域语言编写的文学作品，并对当地市场经营者和城市消费者进行人类学研究，以了解私人和公共消费如何在咖啡业议程中占据重要地位。探索国家，行业和供需方行为者的代理机构的作用，目前的项目旨在为南亚消费史的相对较新的流派做出贡献，特别是参考印度咖啡消费的历史，以及关于消费和消费者的更大的社会学话语。

This research will explore the trajectory of coffee as a commodity and its consumption in the domestic market in India, a subject that has not been analyzed systematically so far. It is little known that coffee has a longer history than tea in India. Yet, though a latecomer, tea is considered to be the national drink. The current project aims at sketching a long term history of the consumption of coffee since the introduction of large scale production of the commodity in India in the 1830s in order to understand where the commodity stands in the hierarchy of hot beverages, if there has been a change in the social attitude towards the commodity, who the consumers of coffee have been, and to analyze the politics of consumption in the sense what guides the choice of a particular beverage. The hypothesis guiding this research is that as a foreign exchange earner, coffee has historically been meant for the export market, the domestic market being systematically addressed for the first time in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929. In the post-World War II era, when new markets were opened to Indian coffee, the domestic market was relegated to the background again till the MNC run cafe chains entered the Indian market. One peculiarity of the Indian coffee market is that just as in the 1930s in the 1990s also the coffee industry addressed the urban educated Anglicized middle class. Now, when India is said to be in the grip of a coffee culture, the emphasis is still on the consumption of the commodity in public spaces. The project will study the official records of the coffee industry and records produced by coffee planters in the colonial and post-colonial period, commercials in the media and literature in regional languages and carry on anthropological research among local operators in the market and urban consumers in order to find out how consumption, private and public, has featured in the agenda of the coffee industry. Exploring the role of the state, the industry, and the agency of the actors on the supply and demand side, the current project intends to contribute to the relatively new genre of the history of consumption in South Asia, with reference to the history of the consumption of coffee in India in particular, and to the larger sociological discourse on consumption and the consumer.