• Jason Burke in Kolkata
  
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 March 2010 19.44 GMT

A Barista cafe in New Delhi, India. Photograph: Amit Bhargava/Corbis

Late afternoon in Kolkata and the light slants across the crowded tables of the College Street Coffee House. Waiters in grubby white suits and ornate hats deliver limp omelettes and piles of biryani rice. The manager, Deepak Gupta, is proud of the range of coffee he offers – black, white, cold or hot, all for eight rupees (12p).

\”We serve up to 1,500 cups a day. Our prices are very low. Business is good,\” he says.

The coffee house is owned by a co-operative society founded in the full flush of 1950s Indian socialism to guarantee cheap food, drink and a meeting place for workers, intellectuals and political activists alike. Some outlets are thriving but others are in trouble, victims of the radical changes in Indian society over recent decades.

The famous coffee house in Bangalore escaped closure last year only after a campaign by locals. Even in Kerala, the heart of Indian coffee-drinking country, 15 of 50 branches are losing money. In Delhi, the capital, 10 coffee houses have shut. The most venerable of all, the Indian Coffee House, has not paid its rent for years and is waiting for the municipal axe to fall. \”The younger crowd seems to go elsewhere,\” says the manager, Janak Raj.

Sitting at a stained table, oblivious to the acrid fumes from the toilets, Ram Shashtri, a patron for 40 years, lists the luminaries of politics and art who were once patrons. \”Every prime minister from Jawaharlal Nehru to Atal Bihari Vajpayee [in the late 1990s] came here. This place is part of the country\’s history. It must not close,\” he says.

A hundred yards away, Rukeen, Sima and Geetika, 18-year-old political science students, are sitting in a branch of Cafe Coffee Day, which boasts of being India\’s largest chain and \”where the young at heart unwind\”. It has air-conditioning, mirrors, comfy chairs and posters. Sima says she comes to \”relax from studying\”. The trio like choco-frappés at 95 rupees and say they have never heard of the Indian Coffee House.

The battle for customers is at the heart of India\’s coffee culture wars. But the conflict is more complicated than a simple face-off between the globalised \”new India\” of consumerist middle classes, so heavily projected overseas, and a crumbling – if colourful – old India.

Sima and her friends have not picked Cafe Coffee Day by chance. \”McDonald\’s is the cheapest hangout and everyone can go there. This is much nicer and only a bit more expensive so we come here. But only a few people can go to Barista\’s,\” she says.

Barista, a chain that opened 10 years ago and now has 230 outlets, with 65 more planned for this year, offers not just coffee but \”an overall experience\”, says Vishal Kapoor, head of marketing and product development. \”It\’s very exciting what is happening in India. The classic coffee houses are part of an era that is ending.\”

Set back off Kolkata\’s upmarket Camac Street is one of Barista\’s premier \”crème\” cafes, where salads and smoothies supplement the \”mocha tease\”, \”cappuccino cookie and cream\” and 90s Britpop soundtracks. Sharing a sofa are Ramit, a 25-year-old share trader, and Ruchika, 26.

\”It is a kind of private space,\” says Ruchika, who works at one of the banks nearby. \”My parents are a bit conservative so don\’t really want me to hang around with a boyfriend. We can meet here.\”

The success of Barista and its like is linked to changing social customs. \”They are respectable, aspirational, a very good place not just for finding expresso but for finding romance,\” said Suhel Seth, a brand consultant.

But those who can afford to visit the new outlets are a minuscule minority of even the relatively wealthy. \”We are just scratching the surface,\” admits Barista\’s Kapoor.

A new India may have emerged over recent years, but a lot of the old India remains – which to an extent explains why the Kolkata coffee house is so full.

Most of its patrons are the same age as Ramit and Ruchika in the Camac Street Barista, or Sima and her friends in the Delhi Cafe Coffee Day. The young men and women queueing for its crowded tables are representative of tens if not hundreds of millions for whom life may be easier than it was, but who are still far from joining the \”creamy layers\” of society, as Indian politicians and sociologists have called them.

\”We talk about girls and sport not politics, and it\’s good here because it\’s cheap,\” says Arindam Chouwdhry, 19, in the Kolkata Coffee House. \”We can\’t go to these new places. They are too much for our pockets. We are from the middle class only.\”