Slopes of struggle: Coffee on Baba Budan hills

Abstract

The history of Mysore coffee is inextricably linked to the mountainous inam lands of Baba Budan dargah situated atop eponymous hills. In the Malnad region of the Nagar Division in the seventeenth century grew probably the earliest coffee gardens of India. This paper examines the significance of the Baba Budan inam lands coffee in the development of the coffee economy of Mysore. The trajectory of coffee, a peasant and a plantation crop, was shaped by regulation and domination by the British administration and European planters and embedded resistance to this control. Native cultivators and the Baba Budan inamdars, as indigenous coffee growers, clashed with European planters over land and labour issues. Coffee was a profitable and popular cash crop, and natives dominated land and production in the colonial period. Competition, collusion and contestation laid the foundation of the two components of the coffee industry in Mysore—native and European.